How am I?
For an update I offer up Henry Bemis. He was the put-upon, bespectacled bank clerk who accidentally locked himself in a bank vault. While inside, a nuclear war destroyed the world and apparently all the people in it.
Except for Bemis.
Bemis was in the Twilight Zone.
Bear with me if you know this 1959 black-and-white classic TV episode. I ‘m going to go over the story which has many levels and layers.
After all, we are talking about “a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity,” Rod Serling sedately states. “It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.”
I’ve been there as a person living with Lewy body dementia. Between science and superstition. Shadows and light.
Before being locked in a vault and before the bombs and before the endless stacks of books, Bemis was a man who viewed the world as encroaching upon his precious time. Time to read the books he loved.
At home, his wife Helen Bemis put constant demands on him, wouldn’t even let him read the newspaper, for goodness sakes.
At work, his boss, Mr. Carsvile, also demeaned and belittled him. One day Bemis steals away to the bank vault to catch some valuable reading time, out of view of the boss.
Reading takes time. Do people read like they used to? I’d say per word consumption has gone up but it’s consumed like a patient with attention deficit disorder.
I know I battle with my disease over my attention span.
I believe the reading public feels, like me, ADD-addled.
Technology pushes 300 channels through a skinny cable from pole to house, every house. The torrent of bits and bytes pours into laptops and phones held in the hands of billions. 24/7.
Bemis had his book and sturdy hiding place. Secured in the vault, Bemis was disoriented after the bombs did their work, the blasts blew the vault door open.
Bemis wanders out through the rubble, even contemplates suicide all the way to the point of putting a gun to his head. Then he sees. Hundreds upon hundreds of books lie in piles outside, blast-blown from a library. Bemis can hardly believe his eyes. What’s bad for everybody, death by incineration, turns out to be good for Bemis. As screwed up as that is, it makes some sense as we watch.
He grins broadly at his good fortune.
“And the very best thing of all is there is time now,” he says, picking up a large clock, amid the books strewn about. “There is all the time I need and all the time I want. Time. Time. Time. There is time enough at last.”
A reader commented on one of my recent articles involving oddball random sayings about life and death. The reader posted this offering: “Life sucks and then it ends.”
Cynical, yes, but enough of a truism to resonate with a lot of people. Bemis’ life did suck. It was mundane and tedious, always spent wanting more time to do the thing he loves, too scared to take control of his life.
Then the bomb.