Preferably Never

At coffee break someone brought up the End of the World scheduled for May 21. On her way back from Fargo she had seen a line of identical campers painted with warnings of the end. This reminded me of a time as a kid when the end was predicted for a Good Friday. The nuns said it was hooey, but after church I went home and waited, not in fear, but with curiosity. At the first tremor I planned to run to the closet where my mother hid the Easter candy and go down gorging.
At work I'm known as Mr. Know-It-All, so I cut my break short and googled May 21 which is actually Judgement Day. The end of the world is to follow on Oct. 21. The End also looms in the Mayan Calendar. I had to return to work and left that for a future search. These predictions play on our awareness that the world will end in three or four billion years at the latest. Even science is on board with that. They resonate even more by scratching at the hard layer of denial that covers our personal abyss.