ten years hence

It’s not even here yet and I’m sick of all of it, guilty that I’m feeling sick of all of it, yet obsessively reading the retrospectives and everybody’s accounts of where they were and what happened to them and how they felt … yet I too am remembering that day.

After I retired from my organizational change consulting business (that, unfortunately, didn’t really change any organizations), in the process of searching for my new place in the world I discovered Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat and study center in the next town over. I’d been going there for over a year, taking classes and, every weekday morning at 8:30, going to Meeting for Worship. When I got there, that sparkling September morning, the room was dark, empty. No one was there, no one arrived.

There was no Meeting for Worship that day – all the staff was on a retreat.

I went back home, and at around 10 of 9 Chip called. A plane had flown into one of the World Trade Towers.

I never went back to Pendle Hill. God, if there was such a thing, was no longer there for me.

It was only after I’d told this dramatic story for a few years that I realized it wasn’t true. It all happened, but on different days. I’m not even sure of the sequence anymore.

This much I know is true: Benjamin, who was living here at the  time, and I watched the smoke and the flames and wondered why there weren’t any helicopters to rescue the people on the roof, until the towers fell. And then we realized there hadn’t been any people on the roof – they couldn’t get to the roof. I told him everything would be different from then on; that we were going to go to war. His generation had never known war.

Phoebe and her then-boyfriend, who had broken up at the beginning of that first year of med school, came here and held hands on the couch.

We had a comfort-meal dinner: meat loaf, potatoes, peas.

And then there was the Anthrax and the plane crash on Long Island and two wars and Bush and more Bush and yes, everything was different.

All these memories take us back to the time Before. On September 10, 2001, America was at peace, we did not torture, and comfort could still be found at Pendle Hill.

 

 

La dolce vita

Italy has views,

Lago Maggiore, from our bedroom terrace

Hydrangea all over the place, even growing out of walls,

cathedrals, stunning even on a cloudy day,

Duomo di MIlano

and even peacocks in wedding dress;

White peacock on Belle Isola

but nothing could be more beautiful than returning to this.

Stonewall celebration after New York State approved gay marriage

Happy Birthday, Bobby

If he’s 70 today, he must have been 22 that day I first saw him. I’d just graduated from high school, and was working at a camp in the Berkshires. Tina and Liz had driven up to take me to the Joan Baez concert in Pittsfield.

That’s who we came to see. We loved her. Suddenly, in the midst of her beautiful voice, she said she wanted to bring out a friend of hers: “Bobby Dylan.” His jeans were so well-worn the knees stuck out. He couldn’t sing. I wrote the next day, in the Thomas-Wolfeian prose I’d adopted (having just read Of Time and the River) in my diary:

The smallness and grace of her; the backwoods aura of him. The vibrating swelling eye killing heart rending sounds of her voice; the one note monotony grinding of his. And the wind and the cold and the smoke and the feelings of teenagers waiting for stars – and yet the overall beauty and grace of her. Was she alive? or acting.

Here’s a better review of that performance:

Joan Baez introduces Bob Dylan at Pittsfield Boy’s Club, August 14, 1963

After writing that the capacity crowd received more than the price of their admission entitled them to when Baez brought on “folk singer and composer Bob Dylan, the hottest young man in the business…” Berkshire Eagle entertainment editor Milton R. Bass went on to write a succinct critique of Dylan’s performance that includes a sentence deserving of a place in the canon of Dylanology.

“His voice is not a pretty one, his guitar playing is just plain old banging away, but there is an intensity about him, a dedication, that forces one’s attention where it belongs.” Milton R. Bass, Berkshire Eagle

The songs Dylan sang that night were “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Blowin in the Wind,” and “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall.” Baez had earlier sung “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Allright” and “With God on Our Side.” 

The audience hated him – they booed till Joan came back.

We waited outside afterwards (hence the wind and the cold) to get her autograph. Dylan was hanging around; no one was paying him any attention. They only wanted Joan.

I felt sorry for him, and asked him for his autograph too. He just scribbled a couple of circles.

I don’t have it anymore – I just have this.

If you can read this you’re still alive

Botticelli's Mystic Nativity (with an inscription saying the world would end in 1504)

The world has been supposed to end only about 30 times,13 in just my lifetime, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that once again it didn’t, but if it did, this blog and this blog post are still around and, actually, so am I (but maybe not you, if you’re one of the 144,000 who got taken up to heaven already), assuming the Rapturous are correct, in which case I’ll have to write another post just like this next October 21, when the world ends for all the rest of us as the world goes up in flames. (Question: does cyberspace burn?)

Cheery people, those Camping followers. It should be a great fireworks show for them up there.

Of those 30 world-ending times, I think the funniest is the woman in 1814 who predicted she’d give birth to the Second Christ on Christmas Day that year. Trouble was, she was a virgin (which shouldn’t have stood in her way), 60 years old (still possible, I suppose), and (most difficult obstacle to overcome) she died on that day instead. Very precise prediction; too bad it was the wrong event.

Happy end times (and don’t forget, if Camping was wrong, we still have 2012 to look forward to)!

Ho Chi Minh’s unbirthday

Chip, who is not one for celebrating time or dates or birthdays, told me tonight that today is Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, and that he very clearly remembers what he was doing, 40 years ago on this date.

He’d been sent to a Green Beret camp outside of Kontum, Vietnam. The Green Berets weren’t too happy to see a guy from Army Intelligence there. It was a long story, he said, involving some body dumped into the South China Sea, just like bin Laden; the Army was investigating.

They were expecting attacks, it being the birthday and all, and so, maybe as a decoy, maybe just because they were pissed at the Army, Chip was assigned his sleeping quarters – in an unprotected area.

He spent three nights there.

There were no attacks.

He didn’t tell me this story then. I’m thinking, tonight, that our children owe their lives to this non-event.

Wait for June, and be of good courage

There’s my friend with MS whose electric scooter was demolished by an SUV, putting her in the hospital with skull and other fractures; there’s my friend who was held up at gunpoint on New Year’s Eve, who said NO!, and walked away; who, several weeks later, was knocked over in a crowd on the Upper East Side and broke his nose, a tooth, and his kneecap and who, several weeks after that, developed shingles; there’s my artist friend who can’t paint because she fractured a bone in her right hand, and another friend whose sister has a malignant brain tumor; there’s my massage therapist and my friend’s husband who have both been coughing for weeks; and then there was the call last night at 4 am … a scary thing, a call at 4 am, in the midst of all of this.

One of our oldest friends had just been admitted with a heart attack. His wife was sitting in the waiting room but, as the nurse put it, was “legally blind with partial dementia,” and their sons had been called but had no transportation.

Well, this turned out not to be true, well the part about the sons anyway: they’re on their way. (The legally blind part is true; the dementia thing is complicated, in that she can discourse about Tolstoy but can’t drive or cook a meal.)

The Romans thought the month of May was unlucky, and performed all sorts of rituals to ward off the evil spirits; and now the world is supposed to end on May 21st (well, only for the Rapturous; for the rest of us it’s Judgment Day).

If I prayed (and maybe I should try), I’d be praying for all my friends, and all of us Judged ones, to make it through to June en bonne santé.

Never thought I’d quote Rush Limbaugh

Well, positively, anyway. Here we go:

President Obama has continued the Bush policies of keeping a military presence in the Middle East. He did not scrub the mission to get Bin Laden. In fact, it may be that President Obama single-handedly came up with the technique in order to pull this off. You see, the military wanted to go in there and bomb as they always do. They wanted to drop missiles and drop bombs and a number of totally destructive techniques here. But President Obama, perhaps the only qualified member in the room to deal with this, insisted on the Special Forces. No one else thought of that. President Obama. Not a single intelligence adviser, not a single national security adviser, not a single military adviser came up with the idea of using SEAL Team 6 or any Special Forces.

I just feel so proud of him (Obama, I mean – but, actually, Rush too): the guy (Obama) who was just a freshman Senator when he moved me to goofy adoration in our high school gym. I remember thinking, then, that I’d look back at these pictures and marvel at how I got to meet him, and at how un-gray his hair was.

Obama got Osama

Under Obama’s leadership, they found him (which President Bush couldn’t do, in all of his eight years). Obama authorized the mission (which President Clinton, when they found Osama in the late 90s, was afraid to do because of potential civilian casualties); and the mission was successful (unlike poor President Carter’s disaster in Iran). It’s going to be a bit hard to question his leadership, as 47% did in the last Gallup poll; or whether he can “keep us safe.”

No matter what his college grades were. But this could be a real opportunity for Mr. Trump. There’s the DNA evidence and the lab that produces it to question; there’s the picture, if they release one – photo-shopped? And there’s the whole ocean to troll for the body.

I wish him well – very well. It would be so nice to have him on the 2012 ballot.

The mystic marriage of Catherine of Middleton

Although I got up at 5:30 to watch, I saw none of the pre-wedding coverage, so these observations are un-mainstream-media-biased, except for the few words I heard Anderson Cooper utter (and the many words in the very annoying voice of Vera Wang that I tried to ignore).

• I’d make a terrible fashion commentator. I have no idea why everyone (well, Vera Wang, at least) was so surprised at Kate’s dress.
• Actually, I liked Pippa’s dress better.

• And what’s with the hats?

But moving on to more important things:

• Harry and Pippa would be gorgeous together. Plus, he had a lot more gold braid.
• The Queen looked kind of out of it during the ceremony, but she seemed to know she’s not supposed to sing to God to save her.
• Prince William (who’s balding!) looked like “What did I get myself into?” during the ceremony (but you can’t really blame him, I guess, since he had to sit there listening to all those prayers and speeches instead of  getting to kiss the bride right away and then walk triumphantly down the aisle).
• And speaking of all those prayers, weren’t there an awful lot of God references for a country where only 35% of the people believe in Him?
• And also speaking of which, although it seems nicely fitting that Catherine Middleton chose the feast day of St. Catherine of Siena for her wedding day, it’s also a little creepy, seeing as how St. Catherine was mystically married to Jesus.
  

  Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine of Siena, by Clemente de Torres

And finally, from the animal kingdom:

• The Royal Cavalry don’t post, adding a nice bouncy effect.
• My cat loved the Royal Flyover.

Times have changed

In addition to the traditional egg roll and an Easter egg hunt, activity stations will be set up to offer something for everyone, including storytime with Sesame Street characters and other celebrities, musical performances, an egg decorating workshop, a yoga garden, a dance party, an obstacle course, basketball, tennis and a healthy eating demonstration in the White House kitchen garden. Of course, no Easter egg roll or hunt would be complete without an appearance from the Easter Bunny, who will officially kick things off.

Back in the dull Eisenhower times the whole thing was pretty stupid. They gave us some sort of long spoon to push a few eggs along the scruffy lawn; you had to stay inside the lines like kindergarten coloring. We didn’t know anybody, and there didn’t seem to be much point – though it looks like at least we got an egg. And we wouldn’t have known what an activity station was if we fell over it.