Small and Simple Things

We spent last weekend in Savannah.

It was a lovely weekend filled to the brim with family and friends and laughter and delicious food.  The Boy was delighted with Pa-Pa's house and has been asking to go back to Pa-Pa's house and play since we got back.

We've spent the week, dragging ourselves through our chores and work and routine.  And I've been reading and pondering on the events of a bright day 10 years ago.  I've been watching the clips of people talking about how their lives changed.  I've been remembering the people who changed my own life.  And how very grateful I am for this little life of mine.  It's not Important.  It's not Influential.  It's not Popular by any means.  It's small and quiet, but it's important to me.

I remember before having the Boy the distinct feeling that I didn't want to bring a child into this world.  This horribly flawed and failing world.

But I look at him now and I realize that by bringing him here, with his heart and his faith and his beautiful eyes that see the world so clearly, that I have made the world better than it was before.  Every time he smiles, I see that the world is a boy-sized bit happier, every time he laughs (and he makes everyone laugh around him) the world is a boy-sized bit happier, and that's when I knew.

That it wasn't books and learning, it wasn't bombs or guns, it wasn't a Nobel prize winning peace plan that made the world a little bit better.  It was a Boy.  As small and simple as that sounds, it is a great and wondrous thing that has happened.  And not just in my life, but in my family's life.  In Chris' family's life.  In the lives of everyone who knows him.

And on this particular day, when I remember so many husband and wife and father and mother and son and daughter shaped holes left in the world by folding steel and breaking glass, by planes turned into bombs and men turned against fellow man, I am profoundly grateful for the little bit of boy-shaped good that I've been able to bring into the world.

Taking it Back

My sister and I have a mutual displeasure with September 11th.  She was living in New Jersey at the time and could see the plumes of smoke from the towers as she picked up her son from pre-school.  Needless to say, it was a strange day in our family.

This year, she looked at me across her kitchen table and said, "We're taking it BACK.  We're reclaiming this day for happy memories."

And she's stuck to it.  Her youngest son, my nephew Joshua is being baptized today.  Her house is filled to bursting with family, our other lovely sister is in town for the festivities and we're all feeling a good deal happier this year.

I can't imagine that this day will ever pass that we don't think of the innocent lives lost or the violence that we all witnessed.  The people who have gaping couldas and shouldas and wouldas in their lives.  And those many, many service men and women who have sacrificed their time, their skills and frequently their lives to prevent such violence from happening again.  But after 9 years, it feels good to sit across from my sister and have her say, "We're taking it BACK."

This Time it's Personal

There's that hilarious line from Steel Magnolias where Daryl Hannah's character, Anelle, says to Dolly Parton's character, Truvy, that her "personal tragedy will not interfere with [her] ability to do good hair." It's a funny moment, but it's funny because there's truth in that.

This is the time of year when I indulge my funk. I drift to the bottom of the navy blueness of it all and rest on the bottom for a couple of days. Then I scrape myself up and kick back to the surface.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to NPR and they were talking about the 4th anniversary of Katrina and one of their guests was talking about how most of the city has been rebuilt, how there are few physical reminders but that if you looked into the eyes of your waiter or waitress you would see the scars that remain.

It started me thinking about how everyone has one. Their own pet tragedy or trauma, some violence that was done to them physically or spiritually that we hold close...that resides in our minds...that we sink under once a year and allow ourselves to hurt all over again.

Remember back to when I was talking a lot about that book Broken for You? She weaves this metaphor of pique assiette throughout as representative of the human condition. How we are all of us broken and pieced back together again and again and again. This time of year rolls around, or the end of August, beginning of September, June 6th or December 7th, or maybe it's a private grief that creeps in year after year, and we all begin to touch those rough edges of our broken bits. To test out the mortar, to make sure that we are in fact, put back together.

What I fret over is this...when it's all said and done. When we scrape ourselves off the bottom and kick to the surface again. When we've tested that mortar and found ourselves sound. Do we look in the mirror? Do we recognize the pieces of what we once were in the whole version of what we have become? Do we find beauty in that reflection? Or only the grief, only the loss, only the what-once-was-ness of it all?

So, I guess, now you know what I'll be doing today. I'll be looking in the mirror of the collective memory of this day. I'll be trying to recognize which pieces are me and which belong to other people. I'll be looking for the beauty that has come...after all.

Things Fall Apart

I am indulging in my annual funk at this time of year. I was sitting in the rocking chair with my small son and rocking him. Last night I had cooked dinner and eaten, he had cried and cried as he usually does while I'm cooking and eating dinner. I picked him up to rock him and calm him and as his breath settled, first those ragged breaths--residual from too much crying, and then that slow steady breath of a sleeping child, I began to think about this day seven years ago.

I was in the air. I was returning from a brief trip to Europe. I was diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia--to this day one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. We landed and disembarked. I had seen such a strange mix of the terrible and the beautiful in people that I felt bruised. We were bussed to an empty hockey arena where we would eat and sleep until such a time as our country would let us back in.

I saw adolescents, fresh from their summer vacations, blowing up air mattresses for us. Handing out blankets and food. Playing with small children whose parents were distressed. I saw people step up and show selflessness that cannot be described. I saw people fall apart like houses of cards under too much wind. I went 3 days without sleeping. I saw the people of Halifax come in droves to the arena to take total strangers back to their homes for hot showers and home cooked meals. I was one of those total strangers. We ate blueberry pancakes with maple syrup.

As I held my small son I was thinking of all of those people. Of how they died. And I wonder, what would be worse, the dying at the hands of those whose hate is so strong and so blind that they would willing take the lives of so many strangers as well as their own? Or the moments before dying when you could remember and wish that you had held your child longer, that you had told your husband or wife how much you loved them, that you could laugh one more time with your friend?

We talk a lot about the people who died on That Day. We talk of them in terms of numbers and the senselessness of it all. We talk of them in political contexts of the 'war on terror.' What we don't talk about are those moments...moments when their grief, their regret at the things they did not do in their lives must have been so intense that it would seem to crush them.


I guess I've learned that the more you love the more you have to lose. And the more you have to lose the more you realize the delicate balance we are all living, how we could lose everything in a moment, that it could all come fluttering down like so many leaves of paper.

The Breaking of the Age

Yuri Tynianov wrote about the Decembrists, that they were those who had "out-lived" their age, that their time had been broken and they had survived it, and as such they were men outside of time. Their existences became fractured, just as the age had been fractured. I think that he felt this way himself during and after the Russian Revolution, that he was living outside of time and that he no longer belonged in the time in which he lived.

I wrote my thesis on this stuff so I've done quite a bit of thinking about it. I think that there are events in our lives which break the age for everyone, all mankind, history if you will. Events like WW2 and the Holocaust. Or even the Industrial Revolution. They are events from which we can never go back, we can never return to the way things had been before them. We can never unlearn the knowledge that we've gained, or un-see the things that we've seen.

I was in the air on September 11th. It is a strange thing to me, flying. So very unnatural. It seems to me that when we fly we pierce the membrane that holds us tightly to the earth and defines us--so for those few hours we become fluid souls, people without family, nation or race. People undefined by social class, religion or education. I feel as though, on that day 6 years ago, I left behind who had been and became someone else entirely. I feel as though my time, my age was broken, and I am left behind as a witness that once upon a time, we lived in a sort of spoiled peace...well, in our sheltered and naive corner of the world.

Perhaps witness isn't the correct word. Because I don't in fact, witness, to anything. For the most part I remain silent on the subject. I don't talk about my experiences on That Day. I don't talk about how strange it feels to be shut out from your own country. How it cuts the ties of loyalty you may have felt for any patriotic ideal. How you watch events, some heroic and extraordinary, as someone completely removed, as from a great distance.

Perhaps that feeling of distance is what defines the breaking of an age. I have debated the issue often in my mind, as to whether or not 9/11 broke the age for everyone...or just those of us who witnessed it in very intimate ways. It certainly doesn't compare with the Holocaust, or The Purges, so how then do we classify this Thing that we also use as an adjective? How do we go on when we know...we do not belong here. Not only here, in this place, but here in this time?

I know. I'm straying close the edge of whinging. And I'm not unhappy. I'm not (often) troubled by it. It certainly provides a unique perspective on things.