All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie

[jlh]

It's a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, warm but not hot. The sort of weather that makes you happy to be alive, the sort of day that makes living in this city just about the best decision that you have ever made. And as you walk to work there's a smile on your face and a skip in your step and you love life and you love the people in your life, all of them, and you think about your own little neighborhood and the "only in New York" place that you vote and the really cute firemen in the fire house at the end of the block and how they bring their eye candy selves into the neighborhood greenmarket with their shorts and tshirts and how seeing the ladder truck outside just makes you smile.

Until you think of another absolutely beautiful early-September day, when you were supposed to be voting in a mayoral primary because that lame duck Giuliani was finally going, but you didn't vote for another month; and when you walked by the firehouse they were already gone and 15 of them weren't going to be able to be anything as innocent as greenmarket eye candy anymore and the ladder truck smashed and repaired; and there are over two hundred children downtown reading 2800 names and the new mayor told the Vice President thanks but no thanks; and Auden, and White; and that you can't even have a run of the mill blackout without everyone on the street talking about the last time they'd had to walk home over the Brooklyn Bridge; and the city, it's still sad. And what makes you feel the most violated of all is that two of them had been in your own little hometown, ate at the Pizza Hut you went to as a child with your mother and your sister who always got a large Pepsi, left from the airport that you've flown out of a million times with its seven gates and it's silly name, and that reporters would decend on that bucolic suffocating place for this reason seems horrifically wrong, oddly more wrong than anything else, which makes no sense but maybe it does, maybe that is the real point.

And my then-boss, in whose office I was when the last bit of news came, who kept everyone calm, dead nearly a year from cancer; and my then-CEO, who sent everyone home and kept the place closed and was the epitome of grace, dead three months from an aneurysm; and neither of them yet 50. Because it all keeps going, and you don't know, and so you are better off settling your accounts as you go.

And it may seem ostentatious to others, but it seems perfectly right to me, that we are still having memorials and rememberences in our own small way, though because it's NYC nothing gets to be as small as we'd like. But in all honesty, it's just a village funeral, and you needn't feel that you must take notice of it. And in fact, perhaps it's better if you don't, though I don't mean that meanly or selfishly, but ladyjaida is right, it isn't the same elsewhere. Not that others haven't suffered, others in Boston and DC and Pennsylvania and LA, but I went to those places shortly after and it really, it wasn't the same thing at all.

On the other hand, it was that day that got me online at home, and brought me to all of you, so it is an ill wind that blows no good at all, even though the good can't measure up to the bad like, ever.

Comments

[phoenixsong]

*hugtightlove*

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Ah. You got the title of your cut from that John M. Ford poem, didn't you?

Thanks for your entry.

[nmalfoy.livejournal.com]

Of all the cities I have visited, I have never felt as home as I did in NYC. The people there took me into their families, and everyone there made me feel welcome. Even when I got peed on, there was a guy walking past who got me some napkins and made me laugh and said something to the effect of "That's life in the city" and made me feel like I was a part of the city. I love New York. I love how I went to the same greenmarket maybe three times in a week, and they knew me after that. I love the fish guy who would lecture me about not freezing fish. To come in any time I needed some and he'd hook me up and teach me how to cook it like his mama taught him. I love the bookstores. I love window shopping and I love fall in Central Park. There's no city in the world like the one you're in. But it isn't really a city. It's more a series of neighborhoods. Interesting that I grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, where you were on a nodding basis with your neighbor, but Felicia (who lives in Forest Hills) knows all her neighbors by name and they look out for each other.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I did, and I actually changed it after you provided that link, so thank YOU. And the title of the entry itself is from the Auden poem.

[mmichelle.livejournal.com]

*hugs multiple times*

[blonde-dude.livejournal.com]

That was really beautiful, and made me sad. I'm now remembering how scared I was on 9/11/01, and how I've grown to be petrified of death since then. It's such a scary thing how you can be talking to someone one day, and the next day you can't ever see them again. *sigh* Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I was really touched by your entry.

[folk.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

[ex-lunasparr180.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of you on that day. ::hugs::