Sixty years ago today, I came home from kindergarten and my mother was at the stove in the kitchen of our house, making my lunch. I don't have a lot of memories from this period of my life but this image is locked in.
My mom told me that the Russians had put a sputnik into space and it was flying overhead even at that moment. I had no idea what a sputnik was, or what the import of what she said was or even what it meant, but her tone, reflecting concern and momentousness, and the unusualness of her talking world events with me, a kindergartener, made this brief interaction forever frozen in time in my memory bank.
This started in lockstep the space race, because we were behind, for awhile, the Russkies, the supposed missile gap, the specter of hordes of Russian tanks sweeping over Western Europe and the Cold War, which we might still be in, after a brief pause for detente. This was the paranoid fifties, when we huddled under our schoolhouse desks with our arms covering our heads during nuclear attack drills.
In this period of mass murders and massive hurricanes, it seems like it was a quaint era back then. My classroom five years later was on the 3d floor of a schoolhouse five miles from what would have been ground zero for a hydrogen bomb airburst over Manhattan; my wooden desk and flesh forearms would have saved my life in such an event for sure.
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And yet when I came home from First Grade at PS30 years later, and asked Father about bomb shelters because our teacher said every family should have one, Dad sat me down and explained about 'ground zero.' The world was never quite the same from that day. How sad that a 5 year old's experience is now considered a more innocent time.
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