Flashbacks

As we grow older, so much of our daily lives from the past can become a blur, but occasionally something will come back in vivid detail. This week, I made an effort to prepare my own lunch rather than buying it or getting it from the college cafeteria. Thinking about what elements to include, I suddenly could envision with perfect clarity what I ate nearly every day of high school:

• A bagel and cheddar cheese sandwich
• Yogurt
• Fruit -- usually an orange, the peel going into the empty yogurt pot
• Large cookies

I even remember keeping the plastic spoon to be washed and reused. (Once, when I was in elementary school, I'd taken one of the real family spoons and absentmindedly thrown it away; never again!)

Recently, in search of something to watch before bed, I found a BBC documentary on the disaster that enveloped Pompeii. Earlier the same day, I'd been reading about the planned new mini-season of The X-Files, and together these facts sent me back in time -- because my brother had a disturbing obsession with TV productions about disasters and alien abductions. I am four years younger than he and a self-confessed wimp, so this was a truly unfortunate thing for my sensitive psyche.

Sometimes these small-screen dramas were downright laughable, like the one about The Big One, an earthquake that finally rips Los Angeles free of the mainland -- or does it just sink into the sea? I can't remember. Others were more upsetting. And with the miracle of VHS tape, we could repeatedly watch "Miracle Landing" (thank you for the title, internet), a recreation of an actual flight where the top of a Hawaii-based airplane rips off and they have to keep flying because there's nowhere to land. I specifically remember a passenger with a strip of metal adhered to the side of his face. Another one, unimaginatively entitled "Crash Landing," starred Charlton Heston as the pilot. (Confession: I had conflated these two in my mind until just now.) Maybe it was my brother's ambitions to be a journalist that drew him to the dangerous and alarming, but I've never understood why these things actively excited him. They don't seem to have permanently scarred me, but this week I tasted once again the combination of fear and fascination. And some home-made lunch.