Sunday, May 26, 2002
I look out the window of my apartment in a Connecticut Avenue high-rise. Above everything hangs a cloudless sky. What a lovely morning. Then comes the thought, "It's the same kind of morning it was on Sept. 11."
I dress, looking forward to the luncheon meeting of the Georgetown Kiwanis Club. The scheduled speaker is Joseph diGenova, former U.S. attorney for the District and a frequent tell-it-like-it-is guest on TV.
DiGenova begins his talk: "On the drive here, I had another reminder of how much things have changed. I thought to myself, 'It's a really beautiful day today.' Then I thought, 'Yeah, the same kind of day that Sept. 11 was.' "
It's always with us . . . somewhere. Even when we think it's not. Watching a video I find myself bracing when the camera begins to pan the Manhattan skyline. Will the towers be there?
If they are, it means that when the movie was filmed, people were inside, working, celebrating co-workers' birthdays, talking about their weekend plans. If I don't see them, I wonder if it is just the camera angle or if they were gone when the film was shot.
The towers pop up unexpectedly. In the new release "Changing Lanes." In a History Channel documentary. Even in a video of Frank Sinatra's Madison Square Garden concert of 1974, "The Main Event." They are as conspicuous in their absence from the new blockbuster "Spider-Man."
One evening my wife, my stepdaughter and I are dining out, laughing and playing catch-up on each other's lives. Then the thought intrudes: This is how it is in Jerusalem -- families and friends talking and laughing, and then one customer walks in and detonates a bomb, leaving dead bodies and body parts and wounded and wailing survivors as part of the debris of a demolished restaurant.
I don't say anything, but later, my wife tells me she had the same thought. Since Sept. 11, "suicide bombers" are part of our vocabulary, consciousness and subconsciousness.
I find myself looking at some people differently from how I looked at them before Sept. 11. Some of the terrorists lived here for years, mingling with unsuspecting Americans. I think of this as I watch an engaging young Palestinian woman interviewed on TV after she had been caught trying to cross a checkpoint wearing an explosive belt of nails and shrapnel. If she were a waitress in a Washington restaurant, I probably would have thought she liked me.
Sept. 11 is with me when I am picked up by a Middle Eastern cab driver who does not return my greeting. It is there, too, when I have a Middle Eastern driver who seems too bent on convincing me he holds no animus for Americans. I rode with one cabby recently who kept his car radio tuned to a baseball game, and his cell phone signaled an incoming call by playing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." That's American. But when we arrived at my destination, I asked, "What's your favorite team?"
"Oh," he said, "I don't have one team favorite." If you follow baseball enough to listen to it on radio, you have a team. Should I report his suspicious behavior to the attorney general? Dial Homeland Security?
Sept. 11 hasn't been put away with the American flags that we so proudly hailed and displayed a few months ago. As Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran wrote, "You shall laugh, but not all of your laughter; and weep, but not all of your tears."
Even at this late date, "not all of our tears" have been wept, though we may like to think so. Even though we may have allowed the day-to-day activities and the pragmatic needs of our lives to temper our grief and our fears, the specter of Sept. 11 remains.
-- Vance Garnett
© 2002 The Washington P0ST CompanyVance Garnett FREELANCE WRITER Vance Garnett may be reached at vancegarnett@yahoo.com