Bottled water, matches, flashlights, batteries. Rice, beans, lentils. Canned tuna, chicken, salmon. Canned fruits, vegetables, soups, milk. (What else comes canned? What am I forgetting?) Chocolate, hard candies, sugar. Salt,
flour. Sharp knives, can opener. Candles, hurricane lanterns, kerosene. Bandages, gauze, duck tape, antibiotics. These are the words I go to sleep by, or
that, more likely, hold sleep at bay.
The list
has been with me since I moved out of my family’s house and into my own home—at
the age of seventeen. I left my family
but I brought along my mother’s fear of the end of the world, and her fantasy of
surviving by keeping a well-stocked basement hidey-hole, a room you don’t show
your neighbors. And I brought along, no matter
how many times I moved, her love of apocalypse writing.
The first
poem I can remember my mother reading to me when I was about six is “The Wreck
of the Hesperus” by Longfellow. “Come
hither! Come hither! My little daughter /
And do not tremble so; For I can weather the roughest gale / That ever the wind
did blow”
Oh, her
eyes lit up as she read it! Although my
father was the actor, and she was never interested in the stage, she delighted
in reading aloud the gloomiest tales. I
grew up with Poe and Shakespeare. In my
childhood, and even now, reality was a tricky concept. Pretend was rehearsed and memorized, and performed.
Her physical
belief in the worst to come, and our survival, lay in the basement, behind a
wooden door. (Even she must have known
that door should have been made of steel, not flimsy wood.) It was the time of the cold war, and books
like Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank sat
on our bookshelves like bibles.
She didn’t
see what was really coming—the death of her husband, the father of three. She had no weapons, no provisions, to save
him from cancer. We survivors, tied
together at the mast of loss, held on. Apocalypse
stories must have lost their appeal. Instead,
Anne Tyler, with her stories of odd characters finding redemption, filled the
bookshelves, along with bestsellers of the worst sort—with rich women getting
revenge on the world.
My mother
is dead now, of cancer, the same kind that took my father, lung cancer. They both smoked cigarettes, the invisible
gun of their youth. I have inherited a
dozen hurricane lamps. Nobody needs that
many hurricane lamps, except me. I will
take all the help I can get. Because I
believe in my mother, and my mother believed in me. I will continue on, come hell or high water.
