By David Rose
I am waxing cosmic of late. It must be the approach of the new year, the new decade. It releases my mind from the constraints of time and frees it to wander even more than the norm. Thinking ahead toward what might yet be, thinking back to what could have been. Today is thinking back day.
Second grade, that was the turning point. I’m pretty sure it was in second grade that my cosmic train left the tracks. I can even pinpoint the exact moment. We were huddled under our desks for one of a continuing series of duck and cover drills, when I had my first epiphany.
Above my head was an inch of wood. Good hard maple, but wood none-the-less. It would be all that was to protect me from a Russian A-bomb: the flash, the blast wave, the fireball, the radioactive curtain. I calculated the odds and came to the conclusion that if that bomb were to fall, I was charcoal.
We were told that bomb could come at any time, day or night. We had also been given an abundant amount of home work. I weighed the two, one against the other. If I were to spend that evening doing my homework and the Russians dropped the bomb before class tomorrow, what a fool I would have been. I decided the smart move was to quit doing homework. Of course, I blamed it on the Russians. My academic performance, which was anemic at best, flat-lined.
As an artist, David Rose won both the Arkansas Governor’s Award and the Delta Award. His works are in the collections of Tim Robbins, Bruce Springsteen, & Susan Sarandon. As a writer he flunked every English class he ever sat in. Born in Woodstock, NY, he is very much a product of the 1960s and never really managed to escape that fabled decade. Visit Rose at www.amazon.com/David-Malcolm-Rose/e/B019GBJI9C/ and on Facebook.
