My Twilight Zone Life
I grew up in The Golden Age of Television’s predictable storylines.
Lucy’s light-hearted catastrophes were always forgiven by Ricky.
Beaver’s questions received kind answers from Ward over dinner.
Tap-dancing Mouseketeers showed us a club where we could be happy forever.
Then Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone aired, flipping me upside down.
In 1960 I was barely nine when I watched Season One’s “I Shot an Arrow into the Air.”
I remain haunted.
SPOILER ALERT: The first manned spaceship, Arrow One, rockets into the sky and lands on what the astronauts believe is an asteroid. Murder and mayhem ensue. A symbol scratched into the dirt, by an astronaut who splintered off to search, is misunderstood. It represented a telephone pole along the highway just over the ridge.
I listened closely to Rod Serling’s closing remarks:
Practical joke perpetrated by Mother Nature and a combination of improbable events. Practical joke wearing the trappings of nightmare, of terror, of desperation. Small human drama played out in a desert ninety-seven miles from Reno, Nevada, U.S.A., continent of North America, the Earth, and of course—the Twilight Zone.
My father chuckled.
“Why is it funny, Daddy?”
“Not funny, but sometimes things aren’t what you think they are.”
Although his meaning escaped me, I understood hard things awaited me.
I feared sliding into The Twilight Zone’s dilemmas. But how could I avoid it?
The answer, as my father suggested: IMPOSSIBLE.
The show taught me the problem with distinguishing IS from ISN’T.
One of Maggie’s favorites is “The After Hours.” She loves the tidy department store—all those polished glass cases and charming, well-dressed clerks. Granted, she did not grow up shopping those long-gone palatial downtown stores with exquisite decor, so I see her fascination. But more than beauty underlies this tale. I think she knows that.
SPOILER ALERT: A customer named Marsha appears to be real but in actuality is a mannequin, briefly transformed and delivered to a mysterious ninth floor that she eventually comprehends.
Rod Serling, in his calmly disturbing epilogue, offers:
Marsha White in her normal and natural state: a wooden lady with a painted face who, one month out of the year, takes on the characteristics of someone as normal and as flesh and blood as you and I. But it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Just how normal are we? Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street? A rather good question to ask—particularly in the Twilight Zone.
Maggie read through The Twilight Zone Companion and discovered “the twilight zone” is not a science fiction label, but an Air Force term when a plane is landing and cannot see the horizon.
Like those pilots, I sensed I was often flying blind, clinging to the perceived is-ness of something, when everyone else saw the isn’t of it.
One of the hard things awaiting me lurked around my decision at age four to become an author.
So I see my publishing life in black and white with Mr. Serling’s sly remarks:
For your consideration: Karen Henry Clark, a small-time children’s author believes her next manuscript will be THE ONE. Meanwhile her books descend down Amazon’s sales scale, vanishing by an algorithm without a plug she can pull. A sympathetic figure who turns a nice phrase, sending queries to thirty-one agents who discard her emails, knowing she is not THE ONE, except in the cruel light of the Twilight Zone…where she has resided all along.