Being Paranoid

I CAN CLEARLY RECALL looking at my dead step grandfather in his casket, when I was six years old. I was scared, but not confused. I understood. But I still don't know why my mother decided to take me to the mortuary. Wasn't I too young for that? I was about to enter first grade; maybe mother dea thought it was time I learn about life. When I was eight, JFK was killed. I remember being surprised that such a thing could happen to someone so important. It gave me nightmares. All through grade school, we crouched regularly beneath our wooden desks, avoiding make believe Russian bombs. I was told that any day now, the bombs could be real, so we must be fully prepared. Even in third grade I could easily see that my wooden desk was not going to protect me from a nuclear bomb, but I didn't dare tell the school; in those days we were all afraid of teachers, administrators, and parents, I thought they might get me in trouble for being a trouble maker. I was treated to my first, but not last mass murder at age eleven, a made for media event in a three TV channel world. I have been aware of radical Islamic terrorism since high school. A group of my friends actually dressed up in turbans one night, in 1972, and drove around town play acting like "Arab terrorists". I kid you not. Radical Islamic terrorism was still a novelty then, with a humorous overtone to it from a smart assed teenager's point of view. Today that 'tude wouldn't fly. I decided to stay home that night, and study. Climate change I first heard about in the nineteen eighties, I"ve heard about it more every year since, and it doesn't seem to be going away. In 2011, I happened to be visiting my home town, and while I was there, it got blown away by a category five tornado, one of the largest ever measured. I was out jogging when it struck, saw folks flying through the air, was lucky to survive, but I was afflicted with a good healthy does of PTSD thereafter. In other words, clouds still frighten me. The point to all this is that it really is no great mystery why I am paranoid. Over the past few years, as I have entered my senior citizenship, I have noticed an increase of paranoia, especially since the tornado. I keep telling myself to "get over it." Its almost as bad as the complete loss of short term memory, but not quite. One thing's for sure, though - if I keep on being paranoid a bit longer, eventually it will be justified by circumstances.