Y2K
Conspiracy theories abounded.
Before the Mayan calendar predictions for December 21, 2012 (but after I’d already dreamt that I was standing in a retirement center dining room when the big one hit) there were the end of the world predictions for the year 2000. Maybe you are too young to remember the stockpiling, the water hoarding, and the not-quite-news reports about what might happen. There were prognosticators who, with straight faces, advanced reports that the end was near, and there were others who wondered about the math. Was it the year 2000, or the year 2001 that was going to be the great reset, the end of the world as we knew it? My office mate, Amy, reassured me every day in jest with a cartoon-like grin, “Don’t you worry none. I’ve got my rifle”.
We worked with people whose memory impairment gave them a stretchy and unpredictable relationship with time. Yet, each seemed uncannily aware that the 20th century was about to end. Anna, for example, who often invited me home for the weekend to play games, sample her mom’s biscuits, and hike Peterson Butte, now told me that she was about to have lived in three centuries because she was born at the end of the 19th century and was about to live into the 21st. And Olga who, while peering out over the tops of her wire rims, cried inconsolable tears when the sun began to set on December 31, 1999. Olga’s tears were the only thing that shook me a little on that day because I had so firmly believed despite all the slobbering predictions that when/if the end came it would do so “like a thief in the night” and therefore no man (Or woman? It’s an open question) knew the day or hour. Still, attunement to the day and hour was so rare for Olga, unprecedented in my time of knowing her, I thought she might be hearing that thief’s footsteps.
All staff were asked to hang out (we brought our kids) and stay on hand until after midnight, in case, well, in case the world ended. I remember music, snacks, and a little toe tapping. It wasn’t all bad, and nothing happened. At least, not yet. The twin towers still stood. From my perspective, the destruction of those towers is the event that marks the silencing of our so-called better angels, but I suppose in any given lifetime we have our measurements and kooky ways of stringing incidents together like beads on a chain to make meaning.
The movie Titanic may have been the first bead on my chain, even before the nightmare that took place in the retirement center dining room, or Y2K, 911, any of it. People went back and back and back for another serving of horror, watching that great ship sink again and again and again. Personally, we were latecomers to the party only going in the summer after the darn thing refused to leave the theaters, and once was enough for me. It was horrifying, as it was meant to be. Cautionary even. I can remember doing a quick scan of my world as I sat in the theater. All was stable, okay, only the usually threats on the horizon: war and rumors of war, environmental degradation, a mass shooting at a local high school, the first of its kind. Over and through it all Celine Dion plaintively promised that our hearts would go on and on, but I did wonder if our fascination with that movie indicated that we were more aware of threats beneath the surface than we knew and if those threats were more real than we could imagine. The James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies that was also playing at the time but ironically couldn’t compete. With the new millennium still three years away, we were already, it would seem, a bit on edge.
In the dream I am standing with residents in a dining room with windows that overlook the sea. As I am standing there watching the tide rise, it engulfs us, but we are watertight, safe. My ever present and laconic inner narrator suggests that it is the proximity to the residents that has guaranteed safety. The wise person builds their house upon a rock, right? I’ve had a version of this dream once before in which a glass shattering vacuum, a black hole I imagine, is pulling me down a nursing home hallway and out into the impersonal stars when a yellow-gloved housekeeper, a woman that I know, simple and honest, works there with her daughter, takes my hand and forestalls the destruction, a one-woman, Bible-believing, clean-up crew and I’m no longer inhaling glass.
I’ve told you too much, I know. But there are two more little beads on this string. It’s 2012, the year of the Mayan prediction, and I am now working in a retirement community that has a dining room with windows that overlook the Willamette River. I recognize it as the dining room from my dream, maybe, sort of, but cannot figure out the significance. Just an eerie little rush of goosebumps up my spine as I look out over the river’s expanse and the feeling of warmth and safety in the room. The water cannot rise this high ever, we are on the third floor, but disaster planning is my work here for the time being, and I am more thankful than ever for the bedrock upon which our community is built.
Oh, and one more thing, some way, somehow this postcard (c 1952) showed up in my waking life. It is close to the dream scene, the closest thing I have seen yet, and in a universe of random facts and experiences somehow I found it, or it found me. I live in an antique town full of antique things and in some ways I always have: Come home with me this weekend. Mom will give you a nice quilt to sleep under and dad and brother will be there to play games. Next morning we can hike up Peterson Butte. “Unusually High Tide,” the caption reads. Well, yeah. You think?
