I’ve been proofreading what I truly hope is the last “examination copy” of my new book, a collection of essays I’m calling The Stuff of a Life. It’s a bit boring, to tell the truth. The proofreading—I hope not the book. I wrote it, revised it, edited it, re-read it, re-revised it, had other people proof-read it. So it doesn’t hold any surprises for me, except for the typos that have somehow managed to slip through all of that.
Then, yesterday, in a text-exchange, my youngest son who is—astoundingly—forty-seven, said something that sent me back to a section I’d just read the day before. We were sharing astonishment and fear about what’s happening in Ukraine and its broader implications when he said “I never thought I’d see anything like this. I’ve led a pretty sheltered life.” When I replied that we’d all led such lives, he reminded me that by the time he was a teen, the cold war was ending. He has no recollection of the pervasive fear of those years. For him, this is new. For me, it’s a grim reminder of my own younger years.
Here’s a segment from a chapter called “Waiting for Armageddon”. It will be familiar to some of you, as it aired on CBC radio ten years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I shared it widely then. As I re-read it, in today’s troubling context, I’m thinking of all the parents in Ukraine who must be facing with their children the same solemn truth that my father and I faced sixty years ago, and all the parents everywhere who feel powerless to promise a future to their children.
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October 25, 1962. The whole world is on pins and needles, watching the showdown off the shores of Cuba. I hear the tension in the voices on the radio and in the murmur of my parents’ voices just beyond earshot. The language of war: blockade, nuclear missiles, retaliation.
I saw it and heard it all day, at school, in the faces and the voices of friends and teachers. The language of fear: nervous laughter, shallow reassurances.
Now, fear has taken up residence in the dim evening of my own bedroom, pushing aside the comfort of the familiar wooden desk cluttered with schoolwork, the shabby easy chair strewn with yesterday’s clothes, the metal bookshelf, crowded with university catalogues. For next year. Would there be one?
An October wind brushes the dying elm leaves against my window. I lie on my bed, staring into emptiness, trying to imagine how it would be. Would we rush terrified into the dark basement? Would we all die at once? Would there be weeks and months of pain and sickness? If I looked out these windows afterward, what would I see?
My eyes fall on a round black button attached by its pin to the border of my mirror—an inch across with a white line through the middle and an inverted arrow over the bottom third of the line. Ban the Bomb. A feeble badge of protest in a world turned against itself—the only world I’ve known.
I raise myself heavily to my feet, pass my younger brothers squabbling in their room—they are oblivious, I think—and walk downstairs. I cross the short hallway, past my mom, knitting and listening to the radio in the living room, and knock on my dad’s study door. We always knock; it’s a rule. And he always says, “Come in.” He swivels in his wooden desk chair, takes off his reading glasses, rubs the bridge of his nose, and smiles at me.
“How are you, Paula?” He already knows.
I sit on the settee across from him and stare glumly at the revolving bookshelf holding the volumes that occupy his mind on better days. The eyes of his mother look down on him from a portrait hanging above his desk. Is she protecting him? Will he protect me?
“Dad, I’m scared,” I choke, and suddenly the tears spill. “I’m not even seventeen. I want a chance to grow up.” Then, the ultimate adolescent lament: “It’s not fair.”
Dad’s not a demonstrative man. I don’t expect a hug. But I wait for the verbal reassurance I’m sure will come. “It will be fine, Paula. They’re working it out now. Relax.” But it doesn’t come. Instead, my dad shakes his head. When he looks up, his eyes are moist behind his glasses.
“No, it’s not fair.” His face assumes an expression I have never seen before. Sorrow. He can’t fix this for me. We sit a long time in silence.
Two days later, the world heaved a sigh of relief as it backed away from nuclear war. Christmas came and went with its usual festivities. I finished my last year of high school and prepared to go away to university. The elm tree outside my window turned green again in the spring. And I did grow up, after all.
But I have never forgotten the look in my father’s eyes when they met mine that October day and we learned together that—although a parent’s love may be limitless—its power to protect is not.