On September 11, 2001, I woke to the radio playing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” Before my head cleared enough to recognize that soul music was not normal for my alarm-clock station, I savored Marvin’s whispers-in-the-wind voice. The band’s syncopated bongos rocked my warm and rested body. Lifted from sleep but not yet delivered to the day, I floated on a mellow magic carpet in a mellow boundless world. As consciousness rose, I admired the exquisite brilliance and timelessness of the vocals and instruments. Everything in me felt gratitude for The Prince of Soul and his music. The Viet Nam war was over; I didn’t have to worry about the lyrics, not yet, not before a little morning caffeine.
The DJ broke into the final fading notes, and his typically genial radio demeanor was absent. He was measured and serious. From that moment forward, mellow for me has never been the same. “What!? What did he just say? Did I hear him say that two planes have crashed into the World Trade Center buildings?” His language was unsure and non-committal. He was using words such as unconfirmed, preliminary, unclear, and unsubstantiated.
Before I believed my own ears, I questioned whether I might be experiencing a repeat of H. G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” radio misunderstanding. What I was hearing might as well have been that Martians were landing. The notion that jets were flying into two of the tallest buildings on Earth was inconceivable. One plane could have been a horrible accident…maybe, but two was, without a shadow of doubt, an attack. Jets don’t fly over Manhattan.
On went my TV, and in came the indelible images. There was broadcasting pandemonium. The newscasters were trying to sound professional while signals were being crossed, unedited voiceovers were intruding on the commentary, conflicting reports were being read, and video loops were being repeated over and over until stunning new information arrived, which it did every couple of minutes. There was one compounding horror after another. People were jumping from the windows of those incinerating towers. And then there were the implosions, the incomprehensible, devastating, horrifying, cataclysmic implosions.
I called into work and told them that I was staying home until I knew more about what was happening on the East Coast. I was fully prepared to loose my new job for doing so. The corporate office could be that way. We were swamped with work and under staffed. The first person in the chain of command that I had to report to basically gave me an incensed “What ever,” and I hung up before getting myself into more trouble. My superior was aware of the catastrophe but hadn’t been watching the news. She wasn’t listening to the radio, not because she couldn’t, but because she didn’t want to. I couldn’t imagine sitting at my desk in the Accounts Payable office and processing invoices when the world was never going to be the same again. I felt relatively safe in sleepy Sonoma, but I feared for nearby San Francisco, with its skyscrapers and bustling financial district, liberals and homosexuals. I wasn’t terrified, but my concern for imminent relatively local disaster had me rattled to my core.
As the airspace was cleared, I began to believe the worst was over. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. The President was flying around in Air Force One, and the Vice President was hidden in a secret Bunker. At the end of the day, my husband made the comment, “You don’t slap a lion.” The Retribution Beast had been slapped and unleashed, and for ten years that payback glutton has fed on not only the enemy’s blood and money, but ours too. I haven’t paid the physical price that so many now have, but I have paid the monetary one, we all have. That beast is expensive. I’m honestly not afraid of a direct terrorist attack in Sonoma. What I’m afraid of is the impoverished, desperate, uneducated, unskilled, physically ill, psychologically depraved, and/or spiritually bankrupt individuals who, without remorse, will exact his or her own revenge on me, or someone I love, just because they have been abandoned in favor of the beast.
I pray that that monstrous beast will be re-corralled in my lifetime. In the meantime, I’ll do everything I can to enjoy what I have, and never take it for granted.
Have a great week, and I’ll post again next Friday.
Amen. Well said. God bless.