When you get that sinking feeling.

 

Imagine this. You wake up in the middle of the night. You get out of bed and walk to the bathroom. You stand outside the door and you stop short of entering the room.

Imagine this. You wake up in the middle of the night. You get out of bed and walk to the bathroom. You stand outside the door and you stop short of entering the room.

Where there was once a bathroom, there is now a gaping hole, filled with sand and the detritus of what was once your bathroom.

This actually happened to me in 1986 in Huntington Beach, California. My then-husband and our daughter and I had just moved from New York City to California. Why, Huntington Beach? Why, indeed. 

Back to the gaping hole in the middle of the night.

I catch myself at the door jamb to keep from falling into the pit below.

What is it? I ask myself.

Is the earth opening up and offering me a shortcut to the beach?

Have I entered into a Coen Brothers film?

Perhaps this is just a dream? Too much spice in the spicy Thai chicken?

Have I gone insane?

I call my then-husband and he stands beside me, staring, bleary eyed. He looks down at the hole back the bathroom floor used to be. "What does it mean?" I ask.

"It's the pit of hell," he tells me.

He was prone to being dramatic. He was an actor, after all.

We call the landlord and a man arrives. Actually, he's not a landlord in the way you think of a landlord--not in the New York City sense, anyway. He's the guy who bought an apartment as an investment. He doesn't know anything about fixing things. However, he is a California native. He says he has seen this sort of thing before. The builders used cheap materials and built over unstable land. "You have a sink hole," he tells us.

I thought sink holes only happened in ancient times, involving dinosaurs and tar pits.

No, apparently it's typical for Huntington Beach.

What will we do?  I am hoping he'll turn to me and say--flee! Run for your life! Get out while you can! Before it's too late!

But instead, he says, oh put some dirt over it and then a new floor. It'll start sinking again, but not for a while.

Not for a while?

No, not for at least eight months or so.

By then, you'll be gone, right?

And indeed, we were gone within five months. Off to L.A.--land of sunshine and mudslides, earthquakes and fires. But as far as I know, no sinkholes.

Creative friends--one day you will wake up and the floor beneath you will disappear. Congratulations. You have just been offered an opportunity to use one of your special secret magical powers. Make art out of the emptiness.

And finally, offer it up to this aching world.