The War Against Clutter (Part 2 - The Cold War)

“If this had been an actual emergency . . .”

I was a yearling when the United States dropped “Little Boy” on Hiroshima and “Fat Boy” on Nagasaki in 1945.

While my sister Alice was falling in love with her handsome cowboy in 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon and I played “up in the air so blue” on my swing. While Alice was choosing her wedding gown in 1950, the North Korean army marched across the 38th Parallel and I played “The Fairies’ Harp” on the piano. In 1951 while Alice was nursing her firstborn son in Colorado, President Truman established CONELRAD and I played a new game at Lyon School called “Duck and Cover.”

While Alice and her family were continuing their struggle as ranchers along the Front Range in 1956, the United States continued its testing of hydrogen bombs in the Nevada Test Sites, its production of plutonium at the Rocky Flats Plant northwest of Denver, its processing of uranium and vanadium ores at the Old Rifle Mill southwest of Denver. That was the year I fell in love with Elvis Presley. But no matter how hard I leaned against the high fidelity speaker while he crooned “Love Me Tender,” he could never be mine, so I set my sights instead on the tinsel-toothed boys in junior high. From then on, every week when the air raid sirens blew, every time WJJD paused for a test of the emergency broadcast system, I wondered what the point was of being “good” in a world that was going to end at any split second. I wanted to live long enough to kiss a boy.

In 1971 while I was shopping in the vacuum department of a Sears Roebuck store in Illinois, an air raid siren screamed through the building. The long-awaited nuclear attack had come at last! I clutched my two-year-old son and mourned that I would never again see my husband and parents. I saw all of us facing the mushroom cloud alone. When I opened my eyes to gaze at my child, I saw everyone mindlessly going about their business buying and selling vacuum cleaners. Was it already 10:30 on a Tuesday morning?

Yesterday the air raid siren blew as I walked across the Target parking lot on a cloudless Wednesday noon in Tulsa OK. I’ve grown accustomed to hearing the siren blow for approaching tornadoes, but just like Pavlov’s dog, I still and always react with my conditioned response. While the enemies we face in 2009 don’t play by the old thermonuclear world rules, I am a product of the Cold War fallout that continues to contaminate my life. I’d like to let it go, but then again I’m not sure if I can or want to. It’s one of the strongest threads that weaves me in and out of Alice’s life.

Alice died in 1961 from leukemia.

Mother, Alice, and Elliott years before I was born.

No Handsome Cowboys Yet (Part 1)

Alice was already fifteen years old when I was born in 1944. A baby sister was not on her teenage agenda. She was busy dreaming of horses and cowboys and the Wild West, of living her life somewhere other than in the comfortable northern suburbs of Chicago. She couldn’t wait to get out of the house. I’d like to think of my presence in said house as not so much of an annoyance as a dream catalyst.

Not long after my arrival, Alice talked Dad into buying her a horse that she kept at a stable nearby in Harms Woods. Family lore has it that when she was sixteen, she announced she was going to marry Harry, the stable boy. This news apparently didn’t sit well with Mother and Dad, so they whisked her off with them to a film convention in Hollywood and on down to Mexico City to broaden her horizons. She spent all her time in hotel rooms writing lovesick letters to Harry who reciprocated by having a new girl friend when she arrived home. That’s probably why she was so mad when I hid her lipstick in the clothes hamper. How was I to know?