![]() ![]() Not only that, but my father had told me these masks were the very best, designed by an Israeli. A Russian general I didn't know had taken the time to hand-write instructions. I wet one of the blue letters to see if any ink ran yes, it was actual writing. This surprised me as much as the masks themselves. Vladimir had, in fact, hand written them. I searched through the bags, and in one found a folded sheet of instructions. Whatever these were, they were probably important. I opened one of these flat cans and found a nested stack of clear glass pieces that looked like miniature petri dishes. It was terribly claustrophobic in there, but I quickly surrendered to the idea that if things got so bad that we needed gas masks, standard notions of comfort would no longer apply.Įach mask came in a green army bag, and tucked inside each was a thin metal disk, about three inches in diameter, sealed all along the seam with cloth tape. ![]() That it fit snugly seemed like a good thing. And there they were: gray, heavy-duty rubber, with round glass eye pieces, a black plastic cage holding a filter in place over the nose and large oval filters attached to bulbous cheeks. Unwittingly mirroring the philosophy of some government officials, we decided to keep our own constituents - the kids - uninformed as to the potential severity of the situation we waited until they were asleep before slitting open the box. I'll call my friend Vladimir, he was a general in the Russian army." Within a few days, my father had passed through Moscow, picked up the masks and traveled to Zurich, where he posted them. It did not come as a great surprise when he announced, "I can get you gas masks. ![]() By nature, he is one of those people separated from everyone else on earth by at most two degrees. A classical musician and expert on Soviet music, my father has been traveling around the world, forming a new symphony orchestra. It was through my father's international connections that we finally got our gas masks. We slowly gathered extra canned food, eventually filled the tank and, battling the inertia of disbelief, discovered that it was by then too late to buy gas masks anywhere but for a small fortune on eBay. We could stockpile food so the children could be fed during an emergency that might strand us at home keep the car's tank full in case we needed to make a getaway get some family gas masks to stow away just in case. That first dreadful week, my husband and I lay in bed one night and decided we should do something, whatever we could, to prepare - though for what, exactly, we didn't know. But still we feel there will be no normality to our New Normality, so long as we find such souvenirs nestled against our homes. By now, all the memos footnoted "WTC" that had rained on our local streets since Sept. Last week in my yard in Brooklyn, just across the river from the new neighborhood of ghosts we call ground zero, a pile of autumn leaves tossed by the wind revealed a charred strip of paper-thin metal: a peel of the gleaming facade of the towers that had until recently been the lynchpin of our cityscape. At the same time, we're surrounded by reminders to take precautions for the unknown. We have tried so hard, and will keep trying, to get back to normal. Our gas masks arrived last week in a large box, from Zurich, with a packing slip marked both "urgent" and "economy." It was a contradiction much like the state of affairs here at home: the urgency of imagining, and preparing for, the worst the economy of resuming our daily lives.
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