DUCK and COVER

August 6th 2020

"Duck and Cover"

We were told to get down under our desks and cover our heads with our arms. My classroom had a wall of windows and my desk was near them. Why we were having an atomic bomb drill, I don't recall. It was grade school.

"If I'm going to die, please send me home".

Have you noticed that some memory details get melded together? I mention it because these memories float within  shifting landscapes of place and time.

1955

I was eight when I saw this film of the H-bomb test in Nevada; there was a set; homes in the desert, with 'dummy' family (mother, father, sister brother) in residence and there were also live pigs in a pen. When the blast went off, everything was blown away. 

https://youtu.be/DXg2P9dx-GM

In Hiroshima, real bodies evaporated,

leaving only shadows on the ground.

 

I was only two when it happened, but it was strongly present in my childhood and throughout my adolescence - a significant turning point; the moment when I understood 'the grownups' were crazy.

1945 

 August 6th at 8:16 in the morning, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The American B-29 bomber Enola Gay released the bomb, which was nicknamed “Little Boy”. Sixty two thousand buildings were destroyed by the blast, which was equivalent to more than 12,000 tons of TNT. Eighty thousand people were killed on impact, and 35,000 died over the next week of their injuries or radiation poisoning. Sixty thousand more died over the next year. The bomb exploded over a hospital, and 90 percent of the city’s doctors were killed in the blast. It was the beginning of the end of World War II; Germany had already surrendered and Japan would follow after the U.S. dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later. A year later, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to the publication of an article by John Hersey. The article, called simply “Hiroshima,” followed the lives of six survivors of the blast.

READ

"Hiroshima"

by John Hersey

 

(will open in a new window)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima?goal=0_c98caf23a9-530548a4d6-11875517&mc_cid=530548a4d6&mc_eid=d800919f51

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CHRISTMAS GIFTS

1945

Momentous events swirled around us that Christmas, and though I may not have known what they were then, I absorbed feelings, read distress or calm in gestures, and heard it in tones of voice
as all children do.

These stand out:
January 20th, Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated to a 4th term as President of the United States.  April 4th, American troops liberated their first Nazi death camp in Germany.  April 12th, President Roosevelt died suddenly at Warm Springs, Georgia and Vice President Harry Truman became the 33rd President.  On August 6th, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, and on August 9th dropped a second one on Nagasaki.  August 14th Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender on the radio, signaling that the second World War was officially over.  In a lighter vein, on October 29th the first ballpoint pens went on sale for $12.50 each at Gimbels Department Store in New York City, and one warm June day,
I received my first one after kindergarten graduation.

1949

1963
(a guess, but definitely early sixties)
Learned this poem by heart to perform a recitation for family and friends as my gift to them that year, and much later, in my sixties, I repeated it for my Massachusetts friends but needed the script for some parts.  Here is the poet himself recorded February 22, 1952 at Steinway Hall in New York.

 https://youtu.be/Hv4-sgFw3Go

1991
This little book, a tender tale about the passage of time, came from my old friend and Visual Arts classmate, Theresa.  It emerges from my Christmas Box to join the figurine each year.

2015
What could be more joyful than melt-in-your-mouth
chocolate truffles in the morning from my sweet neighbors,
Talbot, Jenny and Sami-Rose.


***

May our sorrows melt away.

May all have a thoroughly delicious day.