Death In The Family

There was a dream that I once dreamt when in my middle teens. In it, Mom came into my room in the dead of the night to draw our old Venetian blinds. She announced quietly, as if giving a weather report, that the world was coming to an end and that a mushroom cloud was about to form beyond my darkened window looking toward Manhattan.  I did not awaken with a scream and my heart was not pounding, but the blackness was not dispelled when daylight came. The only thing that was unreal and thus, relieving, was the impossible scenario of reporting an imminent event less than three miles away, the destructive force of which, together with its blinding light, would have obliterated, nay, vaporized my bedroom, our house, and us before any such horrific vision could have materialized or been, mercifully, comprehended. Living through the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 only several years earlier contributed, no doubt, to the creation of such an imagining of my unconscious mind.

It was about thirty five years later and exactly eleven years ago yesterday that my dream arguably came true. Yes, yesterday was the anniversary of the assault on the twin towers of The World Trade Center with commercial airliners, brimming with jet fuel, passengers and crews, by hijackers who were religious zealots burning with a collective wounded pride, beyond burdensome sexual repression and with utter contempt for human life, including their own. My personal account in response to the oft posed query "where were you on that day?" is not a very interesting one (I was, for the record, about a dozen miles away in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn working in an office and learning of the holocaust like everyone else via radio and then television). But how the day's events and their aftermath affected me and those I love are what I would like to relate here. Our world as we knew it, did indeed come to an end on that clear crisp late summer's day and the sky beyond my little room's window looking westward was stained for weeks with the discolored streaks from the billions of particles of airborne debris and smoke from the destroyed buildings. Lingering in the air, especially when journeying into "the city" (as all residents of Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx and Staten Island routinely refer to Manhattan) were various stenches, most of them strange and unpleasant. But it was the silence or rather, the unusual or more easily noticed intervals of quiet in the days and weeks following the atrocities that impressed me especially as the beautiful weather continued and the little garden that I had curiously tended to lovingly for the first time the past spring and now waning summer, became the object of intense attention and love.

It felt, each day, like a wake, without the ability to retreat to a wood paneled smoking area in the basement or restroom of the typical funeral home. The appearance of police, firemen, state troopers, National Guardsmen and others felt both reassuring and saddening while the explosion of blooming, waving and displayed American flags was akin to the simultaneous comfort and pain (each and every time a specimen of The Stars and Stripes fluttered before your eyes) of kissing, also each and every time, a newly arrived friend or relative to the funeral parlor where one's beloved is laid out. I must have lost a dozen or more Old Glories as the plastic flag "poles" broke, typically when I forgot to reposition or remove the flag when lowering or raising the power window on my car to which it was attached. Often I would "rescue" a flag that some motorist had also lost, if I were a pedestrian or if the traffic was so heavy that I could leave my car to retrieve it. The stress and grief that we carried around with us could be relieved quite spontaneously sometimes. One afternoon I was driving the stretch limousine that my employer required that I use to chauffeur him to or from business luncheons in "the city." Enroute to a restaurant in Murray Hill, I was quite near the United Nations complex while waiting for a red light to change. Alongside me was a gaudily shiny new tow truck with a huge American flag displayed near its rear hook. At that moment, an impeccably dressed man in an obviously bespoke suit but with a tremendously wide and brightly colored (aquamarine and gold) turban on his head began crossing in front of us. The tow truck driver leaned his head out from his window and proclaimed: "There you are! Now we've got you Osama. The jig is up!" The pedestrian understood that he was the object of this derisive and ethnically wholly inaccurate, bad joke. Still, under the circumstances, he managed to admirably continue on his way, neither confronting nor shrinking from the taunt that seemed devoid of any real menace. Maintaining his dignity, I offered, rather unnecessarily, a meek apology for the boorish remark as the foreign gent walked past my hood.  The tension of the last several days then immediately evaporated and I began to uncontrollably giggle like a junior high school student in the enclosed limo.  The outsized headgear, quite like that of Johnny Carson's character The Great Carnac and simply the need to let go of all the recent hurt, culminated in a laughing jag that didn't subside until my boss entered the vehicle twenty minutes later.

One final recollection, chilling, I'm afraid, was yet another facet of the complex and unending learning lesson and grandaddy of all cautionary tales that was and is the darkest day in American history.  Two nights following the attacks, Thursday evening, the mild weather continued and our screened windows all remained opened. An unknown neighbor in a three story house diagonally beyond our backyard was apparently throwing a party.  It was not particularly loud or raucous, but a certain steadiness in the strange music's beat, followed by what seemed to be a kind of chanting was a very curious event on this weekday evening and during this somber time. The participants were completely within the premises and were largely unseen, but the chanting began to increase in volume with shorter and shorter intervals of silence.  Clearly heard was now the word "Allah!" repeated over and over until one's sorrow and weariness was finally roused from its lethargically well set position. One vaguely knew that salt was being poured into one's wounds, but it was not until several days later and after news reports advised of the need to communicate with law enforcement authorities about strange or inappropriate behavior that I called to report what transpired.  I later imagined that had battle hardened Londoners during The Blitz come upon a secret rathskeller somewhere near, let's say, Buckingham Palace, in which sodden Teutonics clinked tall beer steins and drank to the good health of Der Fuhrer, there would have been one huge and bloody row with no German speaking reveler alive to tell the tale. So too, did I belatedly fantasize a grizzly fate for those celebrating enemies of my country, my state, my city, my borough, my neighborhood and my family.  If revenge is a dish best served cold, then the near decade it took to liquidate the mastermind of that accursed day should have marked the day of Bin Laden's demise as a delicious repast. But it was not. The war continues and the blackness in men's hearts seems immutable and unheeding of advances in science or any other human strivings without reliance on a Greater Intelligence than ourselves. Yet certainly, a perverted monotheism serves us not and yet we must pray and try to do better….much better. And yes, as scrawled in chalk on a cargo truck's tailgate the day the fight against the Taliban began that October: "Let Us (continue to) Prey."