ASSIGNMENT: "With consideration given to the balance found throughout Nature, in what ways was the (Episcopal Academy) Class of '63 impacted by the detonation of two nuclear weapons in major Japanese cities in 1945?"

THE BOMB, a quavering whitehot shadow, as vague as it is insidious and omnipresent - the LSD nightmare eviscerating planet earth. Ted Turner believes we’ve got 50 years to figure it out: Extinction or co-existence. Iraq (‘the worst mistake in our lifetime’) must be the last war.

‘War Is So 20th Century’- Anonymous

Meanwhile the nuclear sledgehammer proliferates - a deadly orphan buried in a blizzard.

In the 50’s I hid under a school desk. I wink to my best friend, Richard Tebay, knees on cold linoleum, praying that if there was a strike it would be quick. Melting eyeballs snap vanish like the hiss of an extinguished match.

1944: How did the scientists feel who found this fire? If-we-don’t-they-will. Build The Bomb.

2004: David buys a suitcase and blows up a city; Goliath is brought to his knees. We fail to clean the planet up, across the board. Turner is right. DOA by mid-century. Territorial and religious avarice tidal wave us out of dreamland with no one to blame but our weak selves.

The bright side - perhaps in all of this Some Lesson is learned before it’s too late. We The People overcome He Who Rules.

Meanwhile:

My body nears 60, the art-fag amalgam of Dick and Jane (Kinscherf), pale, fleshy, ass flappy, crepe paper neck, spotty back of hand – the hard-on of youth a poem lost in a pocket. As I melt I wonder what bomb power means in the sandlot garden of my own private oblivion? I’ve gnarled through the white water of broken relationship, the death of those close who knew me best, the oncoming goalpost laughing at dreams unrealized and still, in the back of my head, smiles that great sunny afternoon – high school and the balloon spinnaker possibility it was.

How unselfconsciously close to one another we became before losing touch. In elm tree shade, cold bite of after school apple, commuter-trained with history book on laps, blithely numb to instant death (now compact bunker-buster sized) that hovered microseconds above our heads. I remember, riding with Wick Havens in that baby blue weirdo car he drove us to school in, listening to JFK radio announce the beginning of the Cuban Missile Crises - his unmistakable Cape Cod cadence; how silent we were in the car. I shrugged it off. I had no sense of the danger recounted in ‘Fog Of war’. I was more acne fearful of girls than I was of instant death. Didn’t know which closet I was in, let alone how to open the door.

Am I doing much about it? Am I pouring human blood into Nike silos? No sir. Haven’t the balls. At best I work to unseat the shameful Cowboy Diplomacy Administration that passes for international wisdom in DC these days. I pray in my own odd neo-hippie way for The Light to shine and ‘cure’ the blight of our self-destructive nature.

Reading Underworld (Don Dilillo - covering the tickertape expanse of America 1951 to the present) I had that sensation of having lived through it all, but from a distance. As if reading my life, turning pages and tearing them out, one by one, until the book is done and I’m drooling in a wheelchair in a corridor with other end-of-the-line souls. Simultaneously I covet heart-snapshots of the Great Moments in life. I shake my head with wonder at my good fortune in knowing whom I have known, trying what I have tried for, written the songs I’ve written, made the friends I’ve made, seen the places I’ve been. It all makes nonsensical sense.

When my family gently let my Mother’s ashes soak into the ocean off Prout’s Neck in the late afternoon sun, the span of her life, of all lives, like those beginning, middle, ending paintings in museums, rang a distant bell. It was as if a rainbow traced across her universe brimming with life, hardship, laughter, love and saying to me, wordlessly, yes, it’s ok, Rick, the whole picture, megaton bombs notwithstanding, Life is magnificent, start to finish.

Which is where I wind up after beers at the Brendan Behan in Jamaica Plain, or destroyed by a fucked up love affair, or astonished by my nephew who emerged from a terrifying head injury/coma at 12 years old and is totally utterly fine.