Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

My daughter's losing sleep over Global Warming.

She lies in bed at night, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling, listening to the rain on the roof, thinking about the polar bears.

Years ago, when I first attached the stars to her ceiling, I attempted the Big Dipper. It looks more like a Salvador Dali frying pan. Which could represent the hole in the ozone. As for the rain on the roof, well, that's a pleasant enough sound. But not in January. Not at 49 degrees North Latitude.

And as for the polar bears.


My daughter has three recurrent obsessions. They surface at bedtime, after I've tucked her in and turned off the lamp. She worries that her parents are going to die. She worries that she'll never stick her flyaway. She worries that the earth and all its creatures will cease to exist.

Except for sticking the flyaway (in my case I worried that my dolls would never talk), these were the great fears of my own childhood.

I'm a product of The Bomb generation, a.k.a. the bombed generation, which we eventually morphed into, and is it any wonder? We didn't know Global Warming from a hole in the ground. Though unbeknownst to most of us, we were fucking with the earth even as we squeezed the dot of red dye into our margarine packets. And it would all come back to haunt us.

To paraphrase the old commercial, It's not NICE to fuck with Mother Nature!

Behind our Father Knows Best demeanors, our Donna Reed facades,
The Bomb hovered. Like a Shakespearean ghost. Or the smell of Ovaltine. As gradeschoolers, when the siren sounded, we learned to put aside "Alice and Jerry" and move in an orderly fashion out into the polished school hallways, where we knelt on all fours and covered our precious heads, which danced with visions of nuclear sugarplums.

I remember taking comfort in the knowledge that when (not if) The Bomb came, "it" would all be over in a split-second (we hadn't yet discovered nanoseconds). I remember lying in bed at night, swirling designs with my glow-in-the-dark cross (it smelled like eggs), trying to imagine the final explosion. I equated this ultimate firework with God...something so enormous and unknowable that my puny brain couldn't begin to fathom. Like the Sky Diver at the County Fair, times ten trillion.

Then there were the families who actually built bomb shelters. They all lived in split-levels and lined their bunkers with cans of Spam, jugs of water, transistors, batteries and board games. In my town there were three. I worried that my family wasn't modern enough to survive a Nuclear Winter (we lived in a ranch-style). I worried that we might act like the desperate neighbors in that Twilight Zone episode, the one where a single family builds a bomb shelter while the rest of the block drinks beer and makes fun of them. Then comes The Big One. Only nobody realizes it's a false alarm until too late.

In bed at night I thought about God and Khruschev. I worried that God might not be up to the challenge of Communism. After all, He'd allowed Old Lady Comer to poison Archie. And if He couldn't stop some desperate Iron Range housewife from killing a little girl's cat, He didn't stand a chance against some desperate Iron Curtain dictator dropping The Bomb.

The Bomb. The words still send chills.

Global Warming. Meet the new words, same as the old words.


When my daughter asks me about death, from the nest of her bed, Ursa Major glowing down on us, I say the only thing I know to say. It's The Big Mystery. The Big Question. Everything that's alive, dies. I tell her human beings have been pondering this for as long as they've had the brains to ponder.

But my daughter isn't satisfied. She's waiting for something more. Something like hope, like a promise. So I tell her that while some people believe one thing about death, and some people believe another, nobody knows for certain. And, apologies to Martha, I tell her this is a Good Thing. I promise her that, since nobody knows, anything's possible. I tell her this is where hope comes in...we're all free to imagine what's possible.

I hope she imagines winter. I hope she imagines cold and snow. Blizzards. Advancing armies of ferocious whiteouts. I hope she imagines ice, huge expanding nations of ice. And many many many white bears, galumphing over the frozen motherland, gamboling under the stars. And I hope she imagines herself, launching out across this promised land, airborne in a long looping spiral, and tucking in and stretching out and sticking it.