It was 1939. A momentous year. But what did I know? I was eight years old.
I remember lying on the living room floor, propped on my elbows, reading the Sunday funnies. My father walked into the room and said, "Don't you know there's a war going on in Europe?"
"Yeah, I know that. What do you expect me to do about it?"
My father looked at me as if he just remembered that I was only eight years old, then he said, "Nothing, son. There's nothing you can do about it." And then he added, "I just think you should realize how lucky you are to be here in America."
And I said, "I do, Pop, I do," and went back to reading the funnies.
The biggest event in my life was the New York World's Fair. We lived on Long Island, less than an hour's car ride away. As we approached the fair grounds, we could see in the distance the great icons of the Fair, the Trylon and the Perisphere. Up close we felt dwarfed as we looked up at them in awe. The Trylon was a three-sided spire taller than the Washington Monument. Its companion, the Perisphere, was a gigantic hollow ball that fair goers entered in droves to visit Democracity.
We waited on long lines to witness the future according to General Motors, and throughout the Fair a thousand miracles of science prepared us for the marvelous world to come. I saw my thirteen year old brother Ed on television. He was in a different room and yet I could see his tiny monochrome image in real time, talking and moving. This was a magical portent of the wondrous realm of tomorrow.
On one of the last days of the year Pop was shaving and I was hanging out with him in the bathroom saying, "It's going to be 1940. That sounds so modern, so streamlined." All my life had been spent in the 30s and now the odometer was going to click over into the 40s. We would be living in the world that the Fair had shown us, a world of peace and plenty and all the latest modern conveniences.
But back in 1939 we still burned coal in our furnace. The coal roared and rattled as it rushed down the chute from the delivery truck, through the basement window and into the coal bin, raising filthy black dust throughout the cellar. Pop was captain of the furnace. Ed was his lieutenant. I was allowed to help sometimes, shoveling out the cold ashes in the morning. It was a tedious business, keeping the fire going, feeding the furnace with load after load of coal, banking the fire at night, getting it going again in the morning, making sure the fire didn't go out or get too hot.
The scary part was the pressure gauge with its red line. If the needle went beyond the red line, too much steam was building up and the furnace could explode.
One day Pop was at work, Mom was out shopping, just me and Ed at home with the heat growing unbearable. We went down to the basement and the needle was past the red line. I said, "Let's get out of here, Ed."
"No," he said, "what we have to do is hold open the release valve and let some steam out. That'll bring the pressure down."
"I'm getting out of here," I said and I did. I ran up the stairs and out into the empty lot next door. I didn't know how big the explosion would be. Would it blow up the whole house? I moved back another twenty feet. Maybe that wasn't enough. I moved back even further and just to make sure I moved back some more. I stared at the old stucco house, expecting it to explode at any second, killing my brother and destroying our home.
After about ten agonizing minutes, Ed came to the side door and called me. "You can come back now. It's okay."
That night when I told the story to Mom and Pop, I was full of praise for my brother as I told them how he had risked his life to save our house, standing next to the hot furnace, holding open the release valve.
How dangerous was it, really? I don't know, but to me it was an act of supreme bravery. I must have been 60 yards away by the time I stopped backing up. I still don't know if that was enough, but it was probably way too much. Once it was over and I knew it was safe, I wished I had stayed by his side. To this day I wish that. I wish I could have been a braver person.
It was a great luxury a year or two later to move into a house with an oil burning furnace. It was automatic. Nothing had to be done. It just took care of itself and the basement never got filthy.
At last we were living in the bright new future.
Later, much later, I learned that when the Fair closed in 1940, bankrupt, those great symbols of peace, the Trylon and Perisphere were reduced to scrap and turned into weapons.
Bob Brill is a retired computer programmer now devoting his energies to writing fiction, memoir, and poetry. He has published fiction in Nuvein Magazine, A Flasher's Dozen, Lunarosity, and Bewildering Stories. Both fiction and memoir pieces of his have appeared in flashquake. He has also published some senryu poems in Simply Haiku. He has recently finished writing a novel.