Disaster Strikes!

Earthquakes. Tidal waves. Fires.

We withstood them all, valiantly flirting with death and bravely rescuing whoever was losing that same gamble to the fickle fatalism of the elements.

Torrents of water took apart walls, sending brick-littered spray all over us. Raging flames pursued us up every floor of the highest of high rises, until only the roof brought relief. Great chunks of street were torn in half, as easily as a sheet of foolscap, and only a few hurried steps prevented us from plunging into the crudely created chasm.

In short, the small confine that was the continual prey to each of these debacles, week after week after week, should have been declared an official disaster area.

Instead, like us, it emerged from it all more or less pristine, the only consequence of these incessant acts of vengeful nature a rumpled bed sheet or a fallen pillow.

It was a private world created by the confluence of my giddy cousins and I - usually high on sugary, homemade banana splits - and the proliferation of disaster pictures then flourishing in movie theatres.

With wide eyes and leaping hearts we took in The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno, and, in lulls between major releases, poor Japanese cousins like Tidal Wave, or pale imitation Airport rip-offs like Skyjacked.

They were the precursors of today's special-effects extravaganzas, these films, the last big, action-packed events before the advent of CGI. They were also metaphors for a deteriorating world, one being torn apart, tornado-style, by controversies such as Vietnam and Watergate.

We, of course, all of 12 years old, knew none of this - only the giddy, what's-going-to-happen-next thrill that came with confrontations between Charlton Heston and falling lamppost, or Paul Newman and a ten foot flame.

Seconds Away we called our homegrown amalgam of these films, the one we enacted and embellished - piling disaster upon disaster - every time we gathered in our grandmother's smallish bedroom, hitherto an ad hoc Catholic shrine.

What Jesus, who looked upon us from his picture-frame porch atop grandma's bureau - which shook with every rapidly stomped foot and trembled with every fallen body - thought about all of this, I can't begin to imagine.

Perhaps, in his own, quiet way, he was contentedly reveling in the sight of children at play - and not looking on indifferently, as he seemed to be doing in the movies and the adult world.