| . |
. |
All Saints Day Wrap-Up
(cont'd)
11/3/2001 12:25:35 PM Eastern Standard Time
Then it was time for them to go; Irritation clearly was not showing. Just as I was passing Amusement my card, inviting her to call if she wanted, cousin mentioned that I was such a "wonderful" writer, writing all these "wonderful" things about the WTC, writing, writing…
That's when Leering Hope, surprised, was up like someone had lit an asbestos fire under his bum. Amusement just looked like it was one more thing in a very bad damned autumn.
"I could be fired in about two seconds if they find me talking to a reporter," he said.
Oh it was terrible.
"Remember that time," he said, turning to Amusement, who, come to think of it, hadn't looked remotely amused after that very first sighting, "remember that bar, that asshole talking to us about the bodies, what we'd…?"
I explained that I am a bad writer and that I never publish and that I am a really a poet and pretty bad at that too, and that anything I do publish is distilled and that I never use names because I can't remember anyone's names, that that's why I call everyone "doll" or "angel," and that I sort of think in massive generalities about what's going on down here, but more as a country, not for any specific anything.
He was gone. Just disappeared. And she was sunk into that Starbuck's chair, those fake grandpa chairs they have, glazed, hurt, wishing I were gone, or she were gone, far far far. It wasn't anything personal, it was just that her whole world had gone so horribly wrong one fine September morning, and it kept going wrong, and now these stupid, prying white women.…
I hate us too.
After a few moments, during which I apologized a couple dozen more times and repeated everything I could think of as evidence for what a bad, unpublishable writer I am, Leering returned. The young man picked up, actually leaned down and levied up our poor Un-Amusement, swiping the card I'd offered her, winking at us and saying, "Maybe we'll get together sometime." They walked into the gray outside while Linda and I stared at each other in mutual wonderment.
We don't really know each other, Linda and I. Her mother was half-sister to my long-dead father, and we'd probably met four times in our lives. She'd sort of taken me on as a special project a few years before, when my mother died and I'd split with a fiancé. I'd tolerated it, knowing full well I was just a charity case. I'd gone to her wedding last summer, up in Massachusetts. Now, like any sister, I wanted to kill her.
"I guess I never thought of that," she said, looking puzzled. "That they wouldn't, or shouldn't, talk to writers."
But I didn't know her well enough to scream bloody murder at her, shout loud and long, blame her for all the confusion about the air—how dangerous is it, really?—for all my fears about cancers and lung problems and trauma. Was my own dazed state normal, or did it hark back to older, deeper problems? Or even well enough to blame her, as I'd have liked, for hurting the girl, the young woman already so badly hurt.
I shrugged. "Don't know why you would have."
We rambled farther west for a while, peeping through peepholes, speculating, until an officer had to order her off a makeshift fence she'd climbed up on to get a picture. We gave up, then, on making it around the perimeter of the site. She had to catch a train that night, after all. And we headed back to my place for tea, both a little more understanding, a lot more dazed, on All Saints Day, 2001.
~ .
Twin Tower Charms in Wall St Jewelry Shops: $11.99 Silver/$22.99 Gold
12/18/2001 6:58:13 PM Eastern Standard Time
To my dear far-flung ones —
As for what's going on at Ground Zero itself? Don't ask anyone who lives in the 'hood. I pass it three or four times a week alone or with a neighbor: Looks like Hell. Every few weeks a visitor in town—last weekend, Pimm Fox from SF—helps me take special note. "Looks like Hell," I say. Only then, I mean it a little more. Basically, GZ never fails to Look like Hell, or, at night, Robert Wilson's lit version of it.
Saturday, Pimm and I made the evening viewing: He and I and a couple hundred or so sleepwalking along Broadway, scanning the posters, dead flowers, memorabilia. And another couple dozen standing tippy-toe at the gated and guarded street openings at Fulton and at John Sts; some with good cameras, some with the disposable kind, some just watching.
Building Five is the longest standing, the nearest to view, and the one that instructs again and again how hard it is to get rid of a massive, well-made construction. All their hacking and flaming and blasting at it has had, well, amateurish results. Still, it's an anthill on the mountain of what was once there. Most of my friends claim they never descended to the suburban-ish underground mall at the World Trade, with its Crabtree & Evelyn and Banana Republic, but Building Five did house the Borders Books, and we all admit our patronage there.
Over dinner Wednesday night, we argued about whether the fires were still burning. "Of course they're not," said Bo, who lives near the Staten Island Ferry. "It doesn't smell any more, does it?" (He lives on Worth.) My neighbor Ed and I laugh, both convinced we lost our olfactory senses a couple months ago. A couple of others remember seeing huge geysers of water flooding the whole mess last week. Yes, I remember that too, but does that mean that the 1000-degree fire is absolutely out?
Ed says he believes they're still burning because a big cloud remains—which you can only see at night when all the lights are on it. And it's not just dust. "Stuff is definitely going up into the atmosphere." A bond trader who ended up collecting random shoes on the afternoon of the Eleventh, who slaps the radio off in the morning if the news is about Ground Zero, agrees that something's cooking. And Amy, just returned to her place in Battery Park City, is on our side, too. She says, "There are plenty of places where fires could still be burning, places they can't get to."
An ominous thought. Like bin Laden in the Afghani caves. Lots of nooks and crannies under this old island. We get details on that from Peter, an architect-city-engineer type, who's been placing bids to rebuild the train stations. Like a $600 million PATH station for New Jersey commuters which will (may?) be operable in two years—though he says that they may use the old PATH station that's just sitting empty below Church Street parallel to the N&R station. More caves underground! He thinks they're currently parking cars there. I imagine one old ghost still waiting for his train to Hoboken.
Then Thursday, my building cleaner, who knows everything, arrived with the final word. She says they got the big one put out, but there are still a couple small ones they can't get to.
Just as we suspected.
A bus driver for a Hebrew school, Jan also reported she'd had the last day of Ramadan off, on Friday. The parents wanted their kids home safe, in case.
As for uplifting? The lamas are in! Last week I ran into Clinton Elliot, a honcho at the Museum of the American Indian at the U.S. Customs House. I asked him, as we do down here, what's been going on since the towers fell, and he told me about an Iroquois beadwork exhibit (I like the Iroquois, where women got final say) and about the Tibetan monks coming in to make a healing and protecting sand mandala for America.
Clinton said the monks began work on December 11th and of course there was a fire drill on the 12th, so they had to leave their sand and tools and their big bull horns and go out into the wintry wind in their saffron robes and wait for the firemen to give the museum the okay. (Good thing lamas have special training in acceptance.)
I thought it was all very groovy, but that didn't mean I ran the seven blocks over to the Museum. I no longer chase lamas, as I did back in the eighties when Richard Gere was first bringing them all in, and Tibet House was getting trendy. My Buddhist pal Katherine Handin and I were going to bring a passel of lamas to Café Pig for margaritas, though I'm sure it never happened. I probably said it happened. An Irish fact. A Texas tale. Later I saw the Dalai Lama in the Rothko Chapel in Houston (that's true) and once in Dharamsala, India, I glimpsed him whipping by in a chauffeured car. And I have an opinion about what the overflow of Western money has done to the Indians living near his government-in-exile, who get none of it.
Sunday I phoned my Texan nieces, and one was writing a report on the Apaches. So, in the way of spinster aunts, I gave her a little speech on the feminist Iroquois. Met with silence, I pressed on, told her how twenty Tibetan monks were in town to sprinkle brightly colored sand in amazingly intricate patterns, to make a picture out of sand. I explained the little I knew, how the very action was a prayer for peace, how they were going to spend eleven days on it, how on the 23rd they'd sweep the whole thing into the Hudson to show the impermanence of all life. "Can I go now, Aunt Alexis?" I determined to get myself over there with a disposable camera.
So Sunday afternoon, I caught the monks smack in the middle of the old Customs House. A dozen of them were milling about an enormous table amid twenty neatly arranged brass pots of sand and smiling. (Always smiling, these monks!) It was Day Three, and their chalk outline was partly filled in, heaps of color well begun, bright whites and pinks and greens rising—our world in divine form. Five or six monks leaned over the table with absolute intention, shaving powdered color through a brass cone into impossibly fine lines. Sounded like a hive of bees. One was busy with a compass, another with a ruler, and that was all the technology they had, though the mandala looks as computerized as fractals, with scallops and corners and exactly-exact edges. The sand is bright bright, looks like it would stain if it touched you, and came from, yes, Ziploc bags stored in a, yes, FedEx box behind the table.
At four p.m., work was done for the day. The monks cleared the decks, storing supplies neatly back in the Ziplocs, the boxes, then sat down in a half-moon before us, the onlookers. It was time for the closing meditation. For thirty minutes they blew their wild 10-foot horns and made their deep, eerie groaning sounds and chanted and moaned and ohm-ed and sang.
And that was good, no matter what the nieces think of the pix, and even if Mr. Gere's behind it, and even if the whole upshot is, as Clinton quipped, more pollution for the poor Hudson.
With love, AQ
|
