9/11 A Running Commentary

Day Four: At War

It was a night of  thunder, lighting tossing, turning and pulling on more blankets to stay warm.

The rain is still falling. Hard. Relentless. Crying.

My first thought: We are at war. The world is not the same. I am not the same.

"We should have a plan of action. We just can't sit here and wait to see what will happen next." I told my daughter yesterday.

I tare at my brain, attempting to come up with a solution to the situation. We have three cars among us. There is a house up in Vermont we can go to and stay for a while -- just until this "thing" blows over. We can take a laptop,  money and food. Leave here for a while.. "Buy more water" she said.

We have more water than we need. The work at Ground Zero will be difficult . Dust  turned to sod -- a watery grave of twisted steel, bodies burnt beyond recognition, rendered in hundreds and thousands tons of sorrow and grief.

I want to wake up from this nightmare. 

Four days have gone by. I count and loose count of the hours. Who knows the actual count of the missing and dead? Who will ever know? Where will they take the remains after they have been sifted and sorted and investigated?  Questions? Too many that can't be answered.

I watch the news. Thought I'd see my boy friend Adger with his camera in the crowd taking pictures.   He lives near the towers. He called after the first tower was hit.  He'd  ridden his bike all the way uptown. Stayed over at a friends. Was leaving there to go back home. Why?" I asked. Had to brush his teeth he said.

We spoke again on Thursday. He had managed to slip behind the police barricades and got into his studio. He said that it really smelled bad downtown. That he had to tape his windows shut. The smell -- that's what we can't see on television.

Today, we the people -- the terrorist and the terrified, hold this self-evident truth that is so looming and frightening. My thoughts plummet my mind/heart like the rain that won't stop.

They said it would last for hours -- the rain. We are at war, I keep telling myself. My memories trample over each other and pour out onto the terrain of the day. I remember when I was very young,   my mother would tell me things that had  happened before I was a thought, as she'd say,  or too young to recall. She often spoke about World War Two. The sound of her voice comes forward from the deepest recesses of my mind, "You were a War Baby, you know."  In my innocence, I thought this made me special.