I was eight years old the day the world ended. Mother had told me of its coming for several years. The typewriter, an electric model she had bought at Sears, chattered of the end incessantly night after night. Verses, Omens, Figures and Numbers spilled from her fingers as I tried to sleep through the chattering keys.

Sundays we attended Timber Ridge Baptist Church, where the pastor would regale us with scandalous tales of high adventure from the Old Testament and the visceral prophetic horrors of Ezekial, Daniel, Isaiah and Revelations from a wooden pulpit in front of a giant aquarium built into the rear of the choir niche filled with chlorinated water and empty of fish esconced amidst crude paintings of the Holy Land. Communion consisted of grape juice, served in little shot glasses, and unleavened bread in convenient tiny crackers. The empty sanctuary was terrifying when I played hide and seek during Vacation Bible School. I had heard of the Holy Ghost - by far the most terrifying of the Trinity - and I was sure He would nab unsuspecting irreverent children caught hiding inside the altar or under the pews of the choir loft next to the baptismal font.

"Listen my children, and you shall hear

Of a terrible beast, and it's very near..." went the first lines of the poem. I don't remember the rest. It terrified me. It sits in a drawer in the corner of her desk still. She typed and typed, night after night, hundreds of pages, close to a thousand, before quietly stopping and stacking the whole manuscript, complete with drawings, diagrams, numeralogical forecasts and endless biblical footnotes in the drawer at the foot of the desk. She never explained why she started, or why she stopped.

Several years earlier, I had tried to alleviate my fears of the impending One World Government, nuclear war, swarms of man-faced locusts, poisoning of one third of the Earth's waters, the torture and execution of the 144,000 saints, the moon turning to blood, the battle of Armageddon at the Plain of Megiddo, etc. by converting myself earnestly to Christ. I accomplished this by walking down the aisle during on of the lengthy services following a rousing old testament tale of commando bravado and guerilla tactics, something involving a king and a hand-picked force of Israelites wiping out an enemy encampment at night while their foes slept - said commandos chosen because they had not dropped their weapons while drinking from a stream but instead had kept their swords in hand and drunk from the surface of the water with their lips - and telling the pastor that I wanted to be baptised.

The baptism itself occured in the giant aquarium behind the altar when I was five or perhaps six. The preacher, whose name I am ashamed to have forgotten, put on hip waders and carried me down the steps into the center of the pool, perhaps four feet deep and clear on one side. I wore a white gown. He held his hand over my mouth and nose while dipping me beneath the "cleansing blood of Jesus." I turned my head to the side and opened my eyes. I had always wondered if you could see out of the pool as clearly as you could see in. Through the inch thick acrylic I saw the assembled congregation, upside down, earnestly praying, reading, chewing gum or falling asleep during the long service. I was a fish in an aquarium, nothing more, although that was a marvelous thing to experience at the time. I rose from the water unwashed by the cleansing blood of Jesus, feeling exactly the same as I had entered. I had thought this was the path to Heaven, the way to avoid nuclear war and swarms of locusts with the bodies of lions and the faces of men, the Antichrist and his minions, the Beast of Revelations as a a financial system, requiring me to accept a brand or computer chip to buy or sell. It clearly hadn't worked, as I felt no different when I emerged, other than being cold and wet with curiosity satisfied as to what my goldfish saw day after day.

Years later, the morning of the end of the world started as any other. I awoke, rode to school with my father, a half mile or so from home. I spent the day dreaming of Star Blazers, my favorite after school cartoon (known in Japan as Space Battleship Yamamoto) while pretending to pay attention to my studies. Apocalyptic in itself, each episode ended with a statement of impending doom "Hurry Star Force, the Earth has only 167 days left..." At the end of school I went to the front of Suder E. Elementary and waited for my ride. I had two older sisters and an older brother. Between them and my parents I was always picked up between the first and second bus loads. "Walkers and Riders" it was called over the intercom. I waited at the front of the school. No one came. Confused and alone in front of the school as the teachers left one by one, I waited until I was completely alone, then walked the short distance down Jodeco Road to my subdivision.

It was a quiet day, unusually so. It seemed no cars passed me. I saw none of my friends in their yards in my neighborhood. I came home to a locked door. I lived with five other people, all of them much older than me. This was an unheard-of event. Someone was always home at my residence. I tried the back door, also locked. Two of the four vehicles were at home. Still no answer. I tried the windows, finally climbing in the kitchen after removing the screen. Everything was quiet. Unnerved, but not yet panicked, I prepared a snack and proceeded to the den to watch Star Blazers, my usual after school routine. I settled down in front of the television, holding the rabbit ears in one hand, as Star Blazers came on a UHF station and I could only get decent reception by joining my own magnetic field with that of the TV. What I saw turned my blood cold - a TEST OF THE EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM and the accompanying analog frequency.

Immediately it all became clear. The only obvious solution. All the pieces fit in place - my parents and siblings mysteriously absent, the quiet walk home, the cars in the driveway but the doors locked - it was the Rapture come at last! I had been left behind, just like the terrifying movies they had shown at church (currently Harvest Baptist Church - even more apocalyptic than Timber Ridge) and any moment the missiles would be raining down, the starting gun of the Seven Year Tribulation for the unsaved. I set contingency plans in motion I wasn't even aware I had made.

By the time my brother returned from his trip to the store I had moved most of the canned goods, along with my father's shotgun, into the earthen basement beneath our house. It took quite a bit of shaking to get me to stop, because I immediately assumed he had been left behind as well, and I was screaming for him to get in the basement and not look at the flash when it came.

For about an hour, probably less, when I was eight years old, I believed it was the end of the world and my soul would be consigned to the Lake of Fire following seven years of misery. I have never known existential terror like that, before or since. When my filmmaker friend Bret Wood contacted me about composing a song about the Rapture as part of the 48 Hour Film Festival I jumped at the chance, as I lived through the Rapture in 1979, and I remembered exactly what it sounded like. Turns out the film was about a conversion experience, so I wrote Baptism immediately after the Rapture was written out of the script (we had 48 hours to go from a randomly chosen film category to a finished product.)

As a treat (they are unreleased) I have put both Rapture, which has never been heard outside of a few close friends, and Baptism, which made it into the final film up on my page for your listening pleasure and to illustrate this story.  Both of these songs were recorded in a few hours (Bruce Bennett plays an amazing Hammond B3 organ in Baptism), drawing on some of the most defining experiences of my childhood. I don't usually expose myself like this, but a dear friend told me recently that it was important to write if I was going to know my own mind clearly, and I have taken her advice to heart.

For those interested in viewing Bret's film Rapture, and hearing the score in context, you can watch it here:

http://www.cinemaweb.com/illustrated/rapture/index.html