This one is dedicated to my brother, Joe.

For thirty years, I have been walking by the air raid shelter sign outside of my apartment building, and I have kept asking myself, "When can I paint over that sign?"

I found the idea of my brother walking by that sign and asking himself that question cosmically amusing when he shared this slice of his inner life with me. I couldn't stop laughing. Then I realized that he is a far more sensitive guy than I am, and he probably had wondered all those years, "Is it safe yet? Is it safe to paint over the sign?" Of course, if one finds the thought humorous, it is the darkest kind of humor, dependent for its laugh on growing up, as he and all of our generation had, of instructions from elementary school teachers to get under our desks as the mid-day air raid sirens blared across sun-filled Brooklyn streets in the 1950s. Even as children we knew that there was already a kind of black comedy in thinking that our school desks would save us from the fireball, from the atomic wind shattering the glass in the classroom windows and spraying us like shrapnel and probably killing us instantly. In truth, we didn't find the thought that funny. It scared us, took a big place in our imaginations and our daydreams as well as our nightmares.

I can recall that as a child I awakened to the sound of fire engines in the street in the middle of the night and imagined instead that what I was hearing was the sound of tanks and that the shuffling sounds of the firefighters in their gear became the sound of invading soldiers. I walked across the cold floor of our flat into my parents' bedroom and woke my father to tell him that I was frightened, that there was an army outside. He had to take me to the window and show me the fire engines and firemen to assure me so that I could go back to sleep.

What prompted my brother to make his confession, you may ask. Well, the Dow finally broke the 7000 threshold, and where it will go nobody knows. We reminisced about what is now being called America's Golden Age, basically, the 1950s and '60s. Our Uncle Vic who left his tenement in East New York and drove down the poetically named Sunrise Highway to a new life in Levittown, America's first suburb for the masses. As a veteran, he got a discount on the $8,000 asking price for his dream cottage on (the equally poetic) Low Lane. Ahh... Levittown. I can still smell the fresh paint, the not entirely dry plaster on the sheetrock, the dewy grass in the morning, the hint of chlorine in the air from the community swimming pool in all of its turquoise magnificence mirroring the uninterrupted deep blue celestial dome overhead. Sliding picture windows--floor to ceiling--looked out on a vast back yard. New appliances. A brick hearth in which one could ignite real logs into romantic flames which one could view from both the kitchen and the living room. A new powder blue Chevy parked in the driveway to convey Uncle Vic to his job at the Grumman plant. Everything was new, looked new, but most especially, smelled new. Escape to Levittown meant that gone forever were the smells of urban decay, of rotting wood, walls that had been asked to absorb too many strange cooking odors, scatological accidents in hallways, too many dead vermin, too much coal dust and chemicals in the air. A new beginning.

Looking at Levittown now, of course, one finds an established suburb, the originally treeless landscape with its newly sodded lawns (on the site of old potato farms) replaced by ample greenery, extensions on the original cottages and asking prices that are no doubt 100 times the original price paid by returning war veterans, prices that reflect inflation and the infamous real estate bubble. Sixty years later, too few of the children of those veterans have stopped to reflect on what it all meant, what price was paid--even for a modest piece of the American Dream. It was a time when the United States, with about 5% of the world's population, contolled about 65% of the world's wealth. When the automobile culture that helped to pay for the dream took the lion's share of such of the world's precious resources as copper and steel and aluminum and chrome to build twenty-foot long finned vehicles with red leather uphosltery and three-hundred horse power eight-cylinder engines that consumed what seemed like endless, cheap supplies of gasoline. Rarely did we stop to consider the remaining 95% of the people on the planet who were barely subsisting on the remaining 35% of its available resources. Those golden days, we were taught to believe, were our entitlement as Americans. Not only would they last forever, things would just get better and better. We never believed that a day would come when we would have to get used to, as another friend put it recently, with more of less, more of less.

But as the bill comes due for our excesses, we may want to give some thought to what the good old days were really like, and the price we have paid. We may want to point out to some of our kids what that old air raid shelter sign meant to us when we were kids, and of waking up in the middle of the night and really believing that the Russians were coming.

Oh, and one other thought: Is it safe yet to paint over that sign?