My home computer monitor acts like a seismograph. The smallest vibration will set the screen swinging a bit on its swivel base. The monitor stands on a big hard drive, on an old oak desk, in the sunporch off my bedroom, in my 85-year old house, in the seismically alive San Francisco Bay Area. I’m sure it sometimes shakes because of a bus going by outside, or in response to my heavy-footed offspring thudding around the house. But I’m also sure my monitor shakes because of little tremors in the earth. It’s a monitor, after all.

Shaking it warns me that comfort is fragile. Its vibrating shows me that nothing is still. I grew up in the 50s-60s, in California, in the time and the land of forever prosperity. Walt Disney stood at the top of our pantheon, smoothing the bright plumage of the NBC peacock. Disney meant perfection: clean, organized, planned, color-coordinated, safe entertainment. That mythology generated two expectations for the middle-class members of the baby boom: that productions could, should, and must be perfect; and that one will be safe if one stays in line and rides the ride the way it was designed.

Our safety myth was like a force field, and it was short-circuited by the turbulence of the civil rights movement, the Viet Nam conflict, the assassinations. We medicated ourselves with the free sex that was available between the invention of the pill and the discovery of AIDS, with loco weed, and with booze. We lived fast and very seriously.

But in time we forgot the lesson that there is no security, and we slid back into the safety seduction. We’re now of an age when shit happens – cancer and fluky accidental deaths, discoveries about divorce or dementia – and we seem to find each tragic event outrageous. We’re still that young. We whine for fairness.

It’s not fair to find a pimple on a face old enough to have wrinkles. But our generation keeps breaking out.

At least, that’s the way it seems to me, and I’m not a complete alien. I’m willing to believe that we on the coast see life differently than those in the middle of the country. And I know I’m not mainstream about many things. But I don’t think I’m alone in this perpetual identity crisis. I think I’m one among millions who were born into a culture with sufficient leisure to discover its own unhappiness.

“And I’m an alcoholic,” Claire thinks as she reads her typed words. “I’m obsessive-compulsive. I’m addicted to work, solitude, exaggeration, and exercise. I’m about to divorce my best friend. I don’t know what to write next.” She pushes her chair away from the round table as she hears Mary moving downstairs. She saves and closes the file as Mary climbs the tight spiral steps from the bedroom to the living area of their apartment.

Claire figures Paris could just as well be called the City of Spiral Steps as of Light. She can’t recollect seeing an uncurved inside staircase in the week she’s been here. All living areas are small relative to California, but the buildings are so ancient that they were made without inside plumbing. In retrofitting them for toilettes, the space had to come from and reduce the other rooms. That makes sense. But the structures always had to have stairs inside, Claire reasons. Even though spiral steps occupy less area than straight stairs, space considerations probably weren’t an original issue. It must be a style thing. And spiral steps are pretty; no one would contest that. But they certainly are more hazardous than the space-gobbling linear steps of home.

The apartment has the tightest spiral they’ve seen. The steps are made of an attractive wood that doesn’t match anything else in the place. They appear not more than a meter in diameter. Their geometry is lovely, especially when viewed from above. But they’re so tight, Claire is tempted to descend them backwards, as if they were a curving ladder. Her attitude is influenced by the early tumble she took, on the day of arrival, carrying an armload of towels downstairs. She forgot to walk at the outside of the steps. She trod too close to the center pole, where the step isn’t wide enough for any adult foot, and she slid. She could have caught herself if she had just let the towels go. But the habits of motherhood die hard; she’d long ago trained herself not to release the bundle in her arms no matter what. She came through the accident pretty well. She knew right away that she didn’t break anything, and in the course of the next couple of days, her middle-aged body informed her that she’d twisted her left ankle a bit and banged the back of her skull. She necessarily increased her consumption of Jack Daniels.