In my own home, Mother was poised to go berserk at any moment. At school, the Nuns laid in wait for me to do anything wrong as an excuse to whack the pointer on my butt. And then, in the news, Nikita Khrushchev armed with God-knows how many nuclear warheads was looking for any excuse to obliterate my neighborhood, which happened to be in Brooklyn, close enough to Manhattan for horseshoes.

When I was in my thirties, I started to really delve into my childhood experiences. The word that kept coming up for me was grief. It was personal grief, of course, but on the larger scale, grief about living in a world of moment-to-moment uncertainty. I really wasn’t gonna get to see a whole lot in my life because the USSR was out to get us and we were willing to retaliate unto total annihilation. History had brought us to the place where we were so well-armed that it was only a matter of time before we eradicated everything. I was convinced we truly were an experiment that failed.

As a child I was asked to make a decision that most people don’t face until they are adults. I had no doubt that the world was going to end, though I didn’t know when. So the central question of my life became, “How am I going to do this thing called life between now and when?

Next: A simple concept.