A year ago today
my world had not yet been turned on its ear.
Pardon this entry. It is the maudlin musings that have been dwelling and building deep within me for a year now. I try not to let them out to exercise too often. But today, this once, I will allow them to taste the air and see the sunlight before I box them back in again and bid them return to sleep.
A year ago today was a work day like any other. I took an IQ test on the web and posted the results. I listed the latest description of then Kitten-from-Hell’s path of destruction:
The Socialist has become quite disenchanted with The Kitten from Hell. I can’t blame him. We still haven’t found all the pins from his display of Russian pins that the kitten pulled apart, his Lenin banner that he purchased when he was in Moscow has pulls from kitten claws all through it, he has had files strewn across his study area thanks to the kitten, his neck is clawed from the kitten launching itself at his shoulders, and the kitten knocked over and broke one of our fans this weekend (the motor must have fried when it was knocked over face down). Even the placid and unflappable O’beast now hisses at the Kitten when it walks into the room. I may have done everybody a disservice by bringing this monster into the house. I can only hope she settles down soon.
That was the extent of the description of what sometimes seems to me to be the last normal day of the world.
Yes, I know. Greater and more heinous crimes have been committed within my own lifetime. Dictators have been guilty of genocide against their own people. In other lands, those with conviction enough to take a stand against oppression in their own countries have been “disappeared” by the thousands. There have been chemical spills, radiation accidents, and natural catastrophes that have destroyed those living in the area and rendered the land unfit for decades or longer. I have no excuse for singling this event out as having changed “normal”.
And yet, it has changed my normal. I cannot see the world the same way, ever again. I cannot be the same person I was then, ever again. That is lost to me.
I will not watch the television set, nor attend any of the memorials. I cannot ever get the sights of that day, nor the days that followed, out of my mind. There is no point in the sheer masochism of watching it all over again. There will be no catharsis there. I was lucky in that I live so very close, and yet know none of the dead personally. I grieve for their families, their friends, their employers, their communities. But it is presumptuous of me to stick my nose in their despair that was never given the chance to be private.
It is already September 11th in parts of the world. In countries that grieved with us, memorials and remembrances are already beginning. Like some macabre replay of the Millennium festivities, one could follow daylight across the globe and see the candles and hear the speeches of a hundred different countries, all remembering America’s loss. It humbles me. It inspires me. It shames me. When did America ever light a candle for 600,000 estimated to be affected by Chernobyl, for the over 7500 killed in a Union Carbide spill in Bhopal, the over 30,000 Disappeared of Argentina? Perhaps these are not apt comparisons. They were unfortunate accidents, or the affairs of another country. But the sense of shame still clings.
Regardless. For me, it is still September 10th, and the dawn hasn’t quite yet broken to officially start the day. The Kitten-from-Hell that sensed my grief and stuck by my side as I watched events unfold on a flickering screen a year ago, now senses my new griefs, and still sticks by my side, doing what kittens do best to relieve fears and comfort tears: she purrs. And she turns herself upside down on my lap with trust I myself could never grant anything that much larger than me, asking for nothing except that I not let her fall.
I can’t keep the world from falling down, but I can hold a kitten safely. That’s as good a starting point as any.