By the time you read this, Irene will be a distant memory, and hopefully your basement didn’t flood again in the wake of Lee and Katia. While September is often a beautiful month, it can be wrathful. As a kid, I remember Hurricane Esther, a Category 4, Cape Verde-type storm sweeping through the mid-Atlantic in September 1961. Where I lived in Atlantic City, winds gusted 69 mph, and parts of the boardwalk were destroyed, a stretch of homes and businesses by the Inlet took 30 years to rebuild, and the seals and sea lions and porpoises that made up Captain Starn’s maritime circus were released into the ocean days before the storm so they would have time to swim away from certain harm. For months afterwards, I spent hours every day meandering through the heaps of seaweed and debris that littered the shore, debris heaved up from the bottom of the sea that included old suitcases and mattresses and bedsprings, dead animals, and tar, tons of tar.
Thankfully our home in Katonah survived Irene very well. We took in no water and no trees fell on our house. It was a nuisance to be without power for three days, but that’s all it was: a nuisance. After Day One, where we grilled everything from our refrigerator that could be grilled, Mr. Sax and I agreed to mostly starve ourselves and eat dinner out. During the day, we got by with easy finger food, like dried fruit and nuts. From now on in, we will keep a stash of “survival food” in the house, which will include almonds, prunes, dried apricots, flax seed granola, water, and chocolate. Mr. Sax insists beer and cola are essentials, too; beer because it’s wet and has nutrition, and cola because it’s medical. How do I know this is true? I once saw a vet tubing it into a horse with a mild case of colic to relieve tummy trouble.
It’s inescapable that September 11 come and go without a nod to 9-11. Everyone’s first memory of the day was that it was so beautiful. I must admit that 8 or 9 anniversaries of this date have come and gone for me without much attention. Still, the 10th anniversary seems particularly affecting. Certain memories of the day remain vivid; walking down the road to see my neighbor outside on her cell, trying to reach her husband who that morning had an early meeting downtown; driving into Katonah and watching the first people coming off the train, some of them still covered in ashes; talking to a man who had walked out of a smoldering tower into the ravaged streets where he walked over to the West Side highway to hitch a ride north with a truck driver. A small thing that no one will remember but me is that 9-11 is also when my book, “View from the Porch” was released. I remember feeling a lot of despair because the book is, at heart, domestic comedy, and at such a time, comedy seemed inappropriate. Much later, people told me that they found solace in my book, because after so many months of pain and grieving, they were ready for something cheery. A few weeks ago I was on the phone with the attorney for Judy Clark, the civil rights activist who had a secondary, non-shooting role in the attempted robbery of a Brinks truck in 1981 that left three people dead, and who is currently in Bedford Correctional serving a 75 years to life sentence. The attorney told me she had read “View from the Porch,” and found it “poignant.” I was touched by that. Part of the poignancy, I said, is because the book was written well before 9-11. “It seems innocent, even naïve, to me now,” I said, a bit sadly. “A relic from a time before we were consumed by terrorism.”
Anyone who knows me knows I’m obsessed with popular idioms. For the better part of a year, I keep hearing the phrase “moving forward,” being uttered. I hear it from the general public, on TV, and from politicians. I did a little research and it seems to be a corporate-speak idiom that, like, “best practices,” originated among suits around 2003, and has since drifted into the common vernacular. The phrase at first bugged me. It seemed a glib way of saying you didn’t see any point in rehashing any old business, when to my mind, old business is usually of significance. We learn from our mistakes. History repeats itself. Not to mention, I love a good blast from the past.
Lately I’ve made peace with “moving forward,” although, like Albert Einstein said, I never think of the future; it comes soon enough. I was freaked to see how many fun, even frivolous events around town this year are taking place on 9-11. That seemed irreverent. But then people who experienced serious losses 10 years ago on that day told me they were ready to “move forward,” and that was a head changer. I’ll leave you with this thought from the poet Maya Angelou, who said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, they’ll forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” So hug someone this Sunday. Or make them laugh. That’s what I call moving forward.
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