All Quiet on the Western Front
It was the summer of 75, I was almost thirteen going on 30 with two wards otherwise known as step siblings and one very hot sojourn in southern France. My Mother and husband number 2, of what would ostensibly be four as time would come to pass, were busy doing research for their next books about Victorian Women or The Journal of Social History. Meanwhile, I was busy enacting Little Women in my own coming of age melodrama on foreign soil. There was a lot I remember about those European summers, not much pleasant and no doubt much still suppressed in the bio-chemical archives of my brain/body.
What I do recall with some precision however is my reading list, if only perhaps that it was a very strange collection for a junior high student in any part of the world. As both parental units were academic egg heads, I found myself with a library of books that were part of their next semester classes as they prepared to teach in the fall. This summer, I would read Modesty Blaze, Madame Bovary, Germinal and All Quiet on the Western Front. As a dyslexic child with a very low reading libido, I confess I remember very little from this morbid quartet save some sinewy legs, sexual indiscretions, a castrated penis on a stick and perhaps that peace truly only comes at the time of your death.
Before age 12, I was terrified of the dark. No doubt my mother would say I was afraid of my own shadow, and it was true that for whatever reason I was a child full of fears some real, the beatings the screaming, some imaginary, the monster’s under the bed. But at 13 with an abrupt divorce and new man in mother’s life (not necessarily in that order) I was dropped into a new world and new role as professional babysitter for two not so much younger children. There were real chores of fixing meals, buying bread and sweeping the dirt floors of the cellar bedrooms two of us occupied and then there were the presumed distinctions that were self-imposed like no longer being afraid of the dark. Somehow as if anointed overnight I became a fearless, take charge, bitch of a pseudo mother that summer. And though marriage number two and the subsequent rugrats where a short lived nuclear fairytale, by the time suitors three and four rolled through town I was still in my full suit of armor.
Looking back, I wonder how that transformation ever took place from field mouse to witch of the west, but even more so I want to know what happened to break that spell not more than 10 years later. I should think the answer lies somewhere in the allostatic load. It seems our body as designed can crank it up or tone it down depending on the immediate needs presented. But when an individual experiences repeated stressors (or perceived stressors) over a period of time the allostatic load can result in long term physical damage.
At this point my damaged Autonomic Nervous System walks a very delicate balance of homeostasis and input overload. So much so, that this morning when a “planned power outage” was scheduled for my bleeding edge technology neighborhood, I was reduced to tears and that all familiar terror of dysfunctional allostasis. When we had received the post card in the mail about an interruption of power on this day, my mind mulled over the possibility of a few minutes or perhaps an hour of downtime while they threw a new switch or added a wazoodle on the grid. But when I spoke to an Edison representative this morning by phone, she informed me that the outage would indeed be significant and was expected to last the full five hours projected.
Five hours? Those of us who cling to our creature comforts, like hot packs for pain, ice packs for flushing, bio-feedback for reducing ANS activation, or even simple things like PHONES and FRIDGE are left completely at a loss when we are plunged into pre-19 Century living. My mind raced for a bit between the endless negative scenarios possible and my creative adaptation gene that would remember that I could still use the gas stove (provided I could find a match) to boil some water and place some large healing stones to serve as hot packs for the morning’s adventure. Though the last week had seen 105° temperatures, Grace provided a slight cloud cover until close to Noon, where I could be outside with the water misters on my body to keep myself cool without a ceiling fan or window air-conditioning. I also realized that our land line would be rendered useless without electricity since our new-fangled phones required AC power to register a call. So I riffled through a few closets looking for an old touch tone phone and came across an O shaped novelty phone we picked up at a garage sale a decade ago. Good thing about old technology, is that it was designed before the concept of planned obsolesce and I was relieved to hear a dial tone when I unplugged the FAX machine and connected the old unit.
While I was waxing nostalgia with old phones and pet rocks, I also uncovered an old spiral notebook with a writing device … I would say the word PEN, but it had honestly been soooo long since I used a hand instrument instead of my computer keyboard that I felt as if I was writing with quill on parchment for the very first time. Armed with as much 70’s flashback paraphernalia as I could think of, I laid a small blanket on the hard wood floor of my living room and waited for the apocalypse to strike.
I listened to the sound of the aquarium filter and knew that when the power was turned off, the soothing sound of the water would be the first audible sign. Thirty minutes past the estimated eclipse, I was still waiting. The small hope that maybe they had decided to postpone or otherwise auto-magically fix the wazoodle crept into my mind.
Just then …. The power filter in the fish tank shut off. The bio-wheels came to a rolling stop and the water was still. Had the energy shift not raised the ire of my little dog that was now running from window to window and barking at the front door, the room would have been quiet. I called over to Dalai and told her to come sit with me on the blanket. She and our old girl Taco took their familiar places at my side, though each had ears up and eyes straight ahead looking more like sphinx statues than playful puppies.
Even though the house was quiet, I could still hear the birds outside my window. It was dark in the house, because I had pulled all of the blinds shut in order to keep the heat of the day as much at bay as possible during the black out.
My college girl came by to keep me company for a bit – raiding the pantry looking for anything that did not require refrigeration or microwave. She settled on a dry bowl of cheerios and some tomato soup – far from Mmmm Good but it was sustenance none-the-less.
Had it been 1975 in the country side of France, I would have faced the mystery with a façade of confidence. But in my 2009 version of All Quiet on the Western Front there was simply a very long overdue moment of honesty where I could finally admit that I was afraid of the dark.
