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EDITOR'S NOTES, continued: 1 | 2
“WHAT WE HAVE HERE is an unfortunate fact of our planet: Its dominant species combines extreme cleverness with an unreliable morality and a persistent streak of insanity. Thus it has ever been; thus it shall ever be. One of the tropes of this tragedy is that ‘life will never be the same again.’ But nothing has changed at all. Human nature is immutable. People have been using every bit of their ingenuity to kill one another since the dawn of time.” -- Columnist Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, Wed. Sept. 12
TUESDAY, SEPT. 11, 2001. WE MIGHT AS WELL lock the day’s numbers into our memory banks since history books will get around to it eventually. Already, Interpol, the international police agency, has set up the “September 11 Task Force.” United Way has launched a "September 11th Fund." I go to an open mic performance night on Friday night to release my swirling emotions -- as good as Prozac for me -- via piano and song. A poet follows me to the stage at the Unity Church where the evening takes place, but before she starts announces portentously into the microphone: “You know what day Tuesday was, don’t you?” She pauses, one eyebrow cocked. “9-11,” she says. We get it, but she wants to make sure. “Nine-One-One,” she adds, to underline the point. Yes, yes, 911, the number you dial in America for an emergency, to call the police or an ambulance. I feel impatient, annoyed. What does this mean? What good is it to know? Give me something I can use! It’s not her observation, I realize later, but the situation. What the hell am I supposed to do? I do kind of like the poem the woman then reads, written by a prison poet with whom she is friends and whose poetry she always reads at these sessions. The prisoner, named Robert R. Reldan, dictated the poem to her over the phone from his New Jersey prison after the planes did their work. I think the poem may be a caution about the karma that we create next, in response to the karma that just yielded its horrible fruit. But I could be wrong about that. The poem is called “World 'Trade' Center.”
This morning there was dew
I SPEND ALL TUESDAY at the newspaper office where I work, doing what newspaper people do in times of contemporary catastrophe. Staring at CNN in stunned absorption, in between trying to gather one’s wits to write local stories that might be of some possible use to our stunned readers. I volunteer for the story I can most wrap my mind around, as a father of two young children: What should we say -- or not say -- to our kids, according to local psychologists and religious leaders? And how to protect them from the brutal images without concealing their import -- and impact -- upon mom and dad? My 11-year-old son has only recently begun calling me ‘Dad.’ Yet when he is not around his peers, or when he calls me at bedtime to come rub his back, or when he is scared, he’ll forget and slip back to calling me ‘Daddy.’ I leave the office after filing my story (‘What to tell the kids and what to let them see?’ the headline says) as well as helping out on another story (‘Religious communities unite in prayer’). I turn my car onto the end of our street about 7 p.m. And there is my son, who sees my car from behind a bush and comes racing up to the passenger side. I roll down the window. “We’re playing hide-and-go-seek,” he says, grinning, and I notice his red checks, flushed from racing about. Then he ducks his eyes down, looks at me. I drive on. I am not sure whether I have just told a fib. I find myself idly computing how many years until my son is of draft age. PAGE 3: Definitely don't get stoned.
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