9
Perfect in His Generations
The summer I sang the lead for Annie it was 1999. My father was in serious
preparedness mode. Not since I was five, and the Weavers were under siege,
had he been so certain that the Days of Abomination were upon us.
Dad called it Y2K. On January 1, he said, computer systems all over the
world would fail. There would be no electricity, no telephones. All would
sink into chaos, and this would usher in the Second Coming of Christ.
“How do you know the day?” I asked.
Dad said that the Government had programmed the computers with a six-
digit calendar, which meant the year had only two digits. “When nine-nine
becomes oh-oh,” he said, “the computers won’t know what year it is. They’ll
shut down.”
“Can’t they fix it?”
“Nope, can’t be done,” Dad said. “Man trusted his own strength, and his
strength was weak.”
At church, Dad warned everyone about Y2K. He advised Papa Jay to get
strong locks for his gas station, and maybe some defensive weaponry. “That
store will be the first thing looted in the famine,” Dad said. He told Brother
Mumford that every righteous man should have, at minimum, a ten-year
supply of food, fuel, guns and gold. Brother Mumford just whistled. “We
can’t all be as righteous as you, Gene,” he said. “Some of us are sinners!” No
one listened. They went about their lives in the summer sun.
Meanwhile, my family boiled and skinned peaches, pitted apricots and
churned apples into sauce. Everything was pressure-cooked, sealed, labeled,
and stored away in a root cellar Dad had dug out in the field. The entrance
was concealed by a hillock; Dad said I should never tell anybody where it
was.
One afternoon, Dad climbed into the excavator and dug a pit next to the
old barn. Then, using the loader, he lowered a thousand-gallon tank into the