The ending that I remember most clearly happened shortly after I joined the Air Force at the age of 18. The weather that year was exceptionally lousy. When it rained, it didn’t stop. It just kept on falling. The funny thing was, it didn’t rain in the desert where I happened to be stationed. It rained in Missouri. I thought nothing of it at first because it always rained in Missouri in the spring and the rivers overflowed.

My supervisor was an old sergeant, forty maybe, with streaks of gray in his hair and a bible under his arm. Whenever he had a slack moment, he’d open his bible and read silently. Then, he’d bow his head and pray.

One day he announced that the world was going to end in a great flood. At first, I believed him because he was a smart guy, maybe one of the smartest guys I’d ever met. And with his age and gray hair, he looked wise.

On top of that, the flooding in Missouri was big news. It was in the papers just about every day. What’s a buck ass private supposed to think when a sergeant tells him the world is going to end and the newspapers make it sound like Noah’s flood? The world is going to end, by God.

After about a week of the sergeant’s reading and praying, I began to sweat when I woke up every morning for fear the rain was going to start falling while I was patrolling the perimeter fence. The perimeter fence was one hell of a long way from the main base where, in my naïve mind, I’d be safe when the flood came. It never dawned on me that it wouldn’t make any difference where we were when the end came.

The sergeant’s ritual went on for more than a month. And every day as I listened to him and visualized the flood water crashing over the sand and sagebrush and roiling through the streets of the base, tossing airplanes this way and that, I noticed that the desert became hotter and hotter and the good looking wives of the pilots became a little nakeder and nakeder and tanner and tanner as they sought relief from the desert sun by shopping in the air conditioned base exchange.

Time passed and it wasn’t too long until the rain slowed down in Missouri and the landscape dried out. The newspapers made no mention of a giant ark. Life went on as usual. The sergeant still read and prayed but he didn’t mention the end of the world again. One day he told us he was leaving the outfit for an assignment overseas. That’s the last we heard of him. I was actually disappointed.

The world has ended a few more times since then, but I’ve learned to handle it with a little more equanimity. These days if someone tells me the world is going to end on a date certain, I nod and say something neutral like, “Wake me when it’s over.”