From around 1981-1986 I had an uncontrollable eye twitch that would come and go in concert with the risk of nuclear war. I’m not making this up. After Reagan made his quip about "We start bombing in five minutes", I twitched for hours nonstop until it was clear he was joking. I remember watching The Day After, and my eye wouldn’t stop for days. The twitch was clearly a manifestation of stress, yet only in response to things out of my control-I suffered not a single twitch through deaths, divorce, serious illness-but plant the suggestion of nukes in my head and off goes my eye.
It’s not actually my eye that twitches, but the baggy skin beneath. It is visible as the skin flutters away-something my friends always found thoroughly amusing:
"Hey, Armageddon must be around the corner-Jen’s twitchy eye is at it again."
Oh ha, ha, ha.
Anyway. It’s been years, (well, since around 1986) and my eye has largely left me alone, until recently. For the past week my twitchy eye has been back in full force. Of course my family isn’t helping matters much. I looked up one evening last week to notice my husband reading…On The Beach. Then, because the Universe obviously has a perverse sense of humour, I see my son hunched over a volume from our set of "The United States Encyclopedia of History" (catchy title, eh? It was published in 1967). Curious what he found so interesting, I get up to have a look and he has the book open to "Atomic Age" with a photograph of the launching of a nuclear submarine (decked out in red, white and blue for the occasion) on one page and a mushroom cloud on the facing. I never heard of "Operation Desert Rock", -see you can always learn something you didn’t want to know about. Oh my twitchy, twitchy eye.
And I am worried, very worried. Much like the 1980’s, there isn’t much I can do about it, but sit here with my eye fluttering away.