NEW-KLEE-UR...nu-kli-er...noo-kuh-lee-yer

The first time I became aware of the word 'nuclear' I was in 7th grade, in Mr. Hockenberry's Humanities class. I went to Radnor Middle School, and the curriculum was strong -- meaning the teachers were well paid and generally quite dedicated to providing quality education to the impressionable young minds of suburban Philadelphia adolescents. Mr. Hockenberry was a perfect example of this. He wore Hawaiian shirts to school, dark polyesther pants, and a variety of leather shoes which had once boasted the Brooks Brothers sheen but were broken in from years of travel around the world. He created the "SSS" -- the "Samurai Sanitary Service," which consisted of Seven Students who, for a month at a time, left class 10 minutes early to pick up any trash that had been discarded on the carpeted hallway floors. By the end of our 7th grade year, everyone had worn the SSS armband. I think it was Tim Rowe who pointed out that the SSS was actually a spin on Hitler's "SS," -- which gave the armbands an added quality of mystery. We were Japanese Samurai, not World War II War Criminals, and our intentions were of the purest form: to keep the hallways of Radnor Middle School free from trash.

One day, Mr. Hockenberry sent home a form for all the parents to sign. He would be showing black and white footage from the tragedies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- and if any parent objected to their child seeing this footage, they could of course opt out. Most everyone signed up for the in-class movie, brought to life by the film projector which hummed and flickered August 6th and 9th, 1945 -- onto the nylon screen. First, there was news reel footage of the silver air force bombers, their hatches like Pez dispensers, popping out blimp shaped bombs, which hovered for a moment before beginning their descent to detonation. Next were the shadows of human beings burned into the ground in Hiroshima, followed by skin falling from the faces of women as they cried, and the blank stares from nameless souls who were missing limbs. It was hard for me to grasp, this act of war. I understood it in the context of Pearl Harbor -- how they had attacked us first. But still -- this bomb, this 'atom' bomb -- was all together different.

Filled with questions and imagery, I remember talking to my Dad about it at home in our living room. It was terrible, of course, he told me. And why the US had decided to drop the bombs on such populated cities, instead of the countryside, was always the question that troubled him. But he encouraged me to ask my grandfather, his father Harvey, about it. My grandfather Harvey Taufen knew a lot about Japan -- having traveled there extensively in the 1950's to broker deals between Hercules (a competitor of Dupont) and many chemical companies -- including Mitsui and Teijin. But it was only later that I would learn that Harvey worked on the atom bomb itself in the early 1940's as part of The Manhattan Project. He was one of the many bright, young chemists plucked from graduate programs and brought to Oak Ridge, TN with his young wife Helen, and their small child Lester. They lived in government housing built amidst a pine tree grove, and when it rained, the mud was almost knee deep. From my grandfather's memoirs I have these details, plus the strange description of the place where they separated the isotopes -- as large as a football field and so magnetic that if anyone happened to approach with something metal in hand, they were in danger of losing it.

Later -- I would travel to Japan as an 18-year old exchange student, and visit Hiroshima myself. The shadows are still there, burned into the ground -- preserved so that the world will not forget. But it is now, that I am back here, after the 9.0 earthquake that rocked Sendai on Friday -- that I am thinking of all things that fall into the category of man-made radiation. Atom bombs and nuclear plants, specifically. And of the 11 compromised nuclear power plants at present amidst a total of 52 -- within a country the size of California (Japan is about as big as California, with half the population of The United States). Hobbled after WWII, with no standing army, and dismal prospects of regaining a place in the developing world -- what was Japan left to do? I am left to ponder the decisions to build these powerhouses of isotopic energy. And the irony that their very construction was a direct result of the devastation such energy had caused.

It's a lot to process right now. This morning I felt myself getting a little panicked, even after a session of qui gong and the lighting of some incense -- I started to cry. But then I remembered what Michael, Junko and Cathy told me: stay hydrated and sing to myself. So I sang "Don't Cry for Me Argentina." Upon seeing my reflection in the mirror, singing the song from EVITA, I started to laugh.

I think Mr. Hockenberry would approve. His class wasn't all horrific images from World War II. I fondly remember staring at Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," as Mr. Hockenberry played the Broadway recording of Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park with George." Who was this woman, singing her red-headed lungs out in the sweetest and most articulate warble I had ever heard? That was Bernadette Peters, I learned -- punctuating each note -- in pointillistic perfection.