It kind of looks like a beach ball on a diet. Or an upside-down garlic bulb a la Dr. Seuss. Or where you might find The Wiggles partying if you popped a hole in the side and peered in. To Jonah, it looks like a miracle.

“Mom, what is it?” he finally asked one day, after countless other days of studying its beautiful blue stripes and enormous roundness and awesome ability to mingle with the clouds.

“That, son, is what you’d call a water tower.”

“A what?”

“A water tower. It holds the water that’s pumped out of the ground. That water it holds up in there is what the city uses to wash its clothes and shower and drink…if you like tap.”

I thought he would be awed by the enormous job of the water tower, it’s “secret,” if you will. Not so. He was horrified. You see, in my venture to impress Jonah I completely forgot something. A couple of years ago, the news of Hurricane Katrina had left an indelible image in his five-year-old mind: Water can be SCARY. Water, lots and lots of water, can sweep people away or leave them stranded on their roofs or… or dead! The sad thing is that I don’t even have a memory of him watching the news with me. Surely I wouldn’t let him see such images. Or? Maybe I, myself was SO absorbed in the ascending water and despair flashing across my TV that I failed to notice how Katrina was working its way into my son’s DNA while standing somewhere behind me.

“So if the water tower pops, all the water in there will flood the world, won’t it?”

“NO, NO, NO,” I answered. “Sweetie, there isn’t enough water in there to flood OUR city, much less the world. Besides, it’s not made out of latex. It won’t pop.”

But he wasn’t convinced. Every day thereafter we’d pass the water tower and he’d stare at it anxiously. It was amazing how, in a matter of seconds, the water tower had gone from being a circus-like statue to a looming tower of death. In an effort to ease his own worry, he wanted us to try figuring out how much water was in there. As if by telling him that it was a thousand gallons, as opposed to, say, 500,000 gallons, we could be saved from destruction. But the number was obviously irrelevant. Every number I came up with was too large. And the really small numbers were as ridiculous to him now as the idea of The Wiggles living in there was before. THEN he wanted to figure out an escape route if, by chance, it ruptured and we found ourselves under five feet of water in a car that couldn’t swim. Nothing I said made it better. The damage was done. I thought, My god, what if he hadn’t been a one-year-old when the Trade Center had fallen? How would that have affected him? How will he handle future disasters as he gets older?

The answer is, he’ll handle them just fine. All that analysis, the studying and staring he’d been doing as we’d pass, all the questioning, it was his way of slowly reaching a peaceful conclusion. He concluded that the person who built the water tower was a miracle-maker of sorts. Jonah, the storyteller that he is, invented a conscientious person who knew what he was doing, who, in his magnanimity, dedicated his life to building a home for the water to stay put until we needed it, and a safe way for it to drain if it got too full. And he hired people to watch over it. And people to take pictures to see how it changes. And, really, Mom, it takes a village, not to mention twenty minutes of your time to hear the entire story from start to finish. But the moral was this: a pretty water tower is a far cry from a hurricane. I just wish I had thought of saying that.

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