After I turned four years old, I lived on an island in the Ohio River in the United States. There was a song, still famous then, called "Beautiful Ohio," which was sung around the piano by nearly everybody in those days. It was a reference to the river, although Ohio itself is a beautiful state whose border was on the other side of the stream from my island. West Virginia lay on the opposite shore and officially included the isle on which I lived.

Well, sir, there came this terrible flood. We lived quite near the river bank, and when I woke up that morning, I stepped out of bed into six inches of water. I was a bed-wetter in those days, to tell the truth, but my bladder never overflowed enough in the "wee-wee" hours to cover the bedroom floor!

That was a mighty big surprise, considering that my room was on the upper floor of the house! It was one helluva flood, but I didn't mind. A puddle jumper as well as a bedwetter (although never into bedroom water sports as an adult), I thought it was fun until I got to the stairwell and found my stuffed panda afloat where I usually went down to breakfast!

You might ask why a three-year-old child was alone in a house filling up with water like a tub. My parents and I were enduring their nasty divorce, and the flood intruded into our lives at a moment when they were separated. I had been booted back and forth like a hockey puck and happened to be with my father for awhile. It seems he had fallen asleep the night before while listening to the radio in his favorite chair. (It was a "Morris chair," a style highly popular then, very comfortable with an adjustable back, and, as Morris was our family name, it was a natural choice.)

He woke up in water to his neck at dawn, with the flood pouring in so fast through the open windows of the room that he could not battle his way to the stairs to save me, so he swam with the current through a window and headed for higher ground where there were boats being launched to save the many who were stranded, like me.

This was in the days before helicopters. (They were called auto-gyros, then, and were as rare and exotic as they are common now, or rescue might have been swifter.) So here came my dad with others in a big motor boat, yelling my name through my bedroom window. I climbed out and aboard to cheers and hugs all around, and off we went to search for other hapless souls. As they came aboard one by one, with dauntless spirits we all burst into song. "Beautiful Ohio" is what we sang. Everybody knew it, and everybody was in it!

When we got over to the Ohio side of the Ohio River - there being no more "high ground" left on Wheeling Island - we stepped ashore at a refugee camp serving refreshments. There, I sat comfortably on my father's knee with a blanket around my shivering shoulders while hungrily munching a doughnut and sipping hot chocolate from a mug my father held for me.

A phonograph in the doughnut shack played loudly above the din of hysterical reunions among reunited families and friends rescued, in some cases, from the dark water itself. The most popular song of the day replayed endlessly in the shack near which we sat: "I don't want to set the world on fire. I just want to start a flame in your heart....."

Looking back, I sense the irony of those lyrics casting a warm glow over the cold and soaking-wet crowd. For years, it remained my favorite song.

Even then, the occasion seemed sweeter than the pastry and the drink. My father had used me as a pawn in his struggle against my mother. I worshipped her and thought I hated him, but not that day, not then! I loved my perch on his strong knee, and after finishing my repast, I fell asleep leaning against his chest, feeling as protected against the elements as I might have felt in my mother's womb.

That was one of the few times in my life I was ever in physical touch with my abusive dad except at the end of his fist on the several occasions when he knocked me across the room in later years.