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Do you ever have scenarios from your past begin to resurface, triggered by varying sources? The one bugging me at the moment is from my fifth-grade year. Here’s the story.

My classmates and I were learning French in a “no English allowed” time frame from a native speaker loading us down with vocabulary lists pertaining to everyday life. For the practice of terms for kitchen items and place settings, she divided us into mini groups to develop and perform skits.

Not having attended the earlier grades with these chums, I was treated with suspicion as the newbie. Though my French was every bit as unintelligible as theirs, I didn’t have a major speaking part so as not to negatively affect the group grade. I was also the youngest and smallest, so it made sense to them to give me the role of the child in our skit, a tantrum-thrower who was to yank the tablecloth in the finale.

The pressure was on to whisk it off, leaving the place settings intact. (Surely the idea came from television. This was 1962.) I practiced at home with toy dishes and a diaper with no success, but during our rehearsals, with heavier props and a real tablecloth, I looked the pro, sometimes. Because of the unpredictability factor, we rehearsed two endings so the surprise would not be ours, but the audience’s. Writing a different ending and/or changing my role were not options considered.

This childhood skit visits my memories when Mother Nature acts up - with frigid blizzards, unprecedented rains, suffocating heat and ensuing droughts, and devastating wildfires. She’s yanking the tablecloths in multiple places, sometimes simultaneously, affecting everyone in general, no one in particular. Sometimes whole tables vanish, place settings and all. Our hearts break for ones served by those tables, and various entities and individuals scramble to help reset them or bring in new ones.

When I glimpse some headlines or hear some snippets of a broadcast, my childhood visual morphs. The tables become huge banquet surfaces, with unseen forces yanking at the tablecloths from all corners, ripping them apart. Elaborate settings wind up in heaps on a rotating floor, with no regard for those who were serving or being served. As resetting occurs, voices bark “You wanna fork? No, here, use this spoon. We don’t have a glass for you, not sorry. You’re hungry? But you lost your seat. Who wants this seat? It can be yours, with all the trimmings, for the right price.”

I’m losing my appetite.