Well. I have discovered peanut butter cookie dough ice cream at Uncle Louie G's- the Park Slope Italian ice institution, where more often than not there sits a very large man who looks suspiciously like an Uncle Louie G, in his muscle car at the curb, watching over his nubile young ice cream scoopers and blaring Barry White.
But that is beside the point, and the point today is that I think I am tired of reading about how other people experienced the WTC disasters. Just finished the New York Times magazine coverage of it, and while there were certainly nuggets that rang true (Judith Shulevitz's essay The Thrill made me glad it wasn't just me: "Somewhere deep in my heart, I have always longed for a catastrophe like the present one. Such wishes may seem appalling once they have come true, but we harbor them nonetheless... there's nothing like being attacked to clarify what's important and to sweep away the nonsense on which we tend to squander our public attention") for the most part I just felt an overwhelming sense of everyone trying to get their two cents in. Which, of course, they are, and my sense of exhaustion with it probably stems from the fact that nobody has as yet asked me to send my thoughts in to the New York Times.
And my thoughts on it, today, are very oddly positive ones- especially for me. After spending the better part of my adolescence cringing every time a plane flew overhead, firmly convinced it was a nuclear warhead flying straight at us; after studying the many horrible ways that biological weapons can ravage a population- what I feel now is, for the most part, gratitude. That I am here and not still safe in Chicago. That I got a good, full year of living hedonistic, blithe Manhattan life before it all came to a halt. (Or, at least, a pretty significant bend in the road.) Before September 11, I walked around the streets wanting to grab strangers and burst into tears of joy: "Can you believe we get to live here?" Now, there is the sometimes impulse to hug strangers, and the sometimes impulse to burst into tears of sadness.... but still there is mostly the fierce appreciation for what it means to live here, to have been rescued from whatever it was that I was doing before I discovered I was supposed to be here. And now we talk about the perils of what will happen next, and I don't doubt that something will. I am simply shocked that it doesn't make me want to retreat. I've always done a pretty good job of rolling my eyes at the military, and anything that smacked of melodramatic heroism, and Hemingway-esque macho posturing. Now all of a sudden there are fighfighter obituaries to be written and they make me cry as I write them. And I wanted to be in the city after it happened so badly I stayed in Manhattan and breathed in the smoke- that's a whole other subject in itself- instead of getting the hell back to Brooklyn, as two helpful cops suggested on Tuesday night. Am I going to start loving Hemingway next?
