(Dignitaries from some other observation of this day. Tish and Jim are to the left. Photo DIA).
I have been feeling weird all summer. I was taking down the Christmas lights this morning- don’t ask- and it suddenly struck me. Wow, I thought, the reception on Saturday night was a thing of great pride and joy.
And it was also identical to Jimmie Stewart’s disorientation at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” You know, the part where the impact of his life and work at the Savings and Loan is wiped out, and that Banker Lionel Barrymore ran everything in town.
I will get back to that, but that wasn’t the point at the time, and it didn’t really hit me until I dropped the long end of one of the strings of lights over the lip of the balcony, and I realized the guy downstairs, if he was looking out, would see dancing Christmas Lights on this anniversary of horror.
I don’t know about you, but I have withdrawn from my usual media bath of blather. I listened to the end of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade when the clock-radio turned on at 0445, and then Ravel’s marvelous Le Tombeau de Couperine on the classical station.
It was the same time I rose that morning eleven years ago at the BOQ at Fort Leslie J. McNair. I showered and got on with it, just as others were doing here in Washington. I drove off post and out of the District to the Pentagon.
I took the shortcut through the spaghetti of roads that all intersect on the big Five Sided Adult Care Facility, marveling at the clarity of the pre-dawn sky, and the brilliant pin-points of stars that wheeled in the velvet blackness above.
Then up the GW Parkway to Langley, where I was working on the sixth floor of the Original headquarters building of the Other Government Agency.
Dan and Vince and their crew were done with the morning brief. Rick and Tish, the Director and Deputy Director, had been and gone- Tish only as far as the next fire-wall in the newly opened wedge when it all went down in fire and ash.
I made a mental note to stop by the Harris Teeter supermarket and get flowers for the graves. Life is a lot easier since I got a pass to Arlington. Back then, it was a long walk down the hill from the Old Chapel to the gravesites over looking the vast bulk of the Pentagon, and in the next several years it was a point of honor to walk the same path.
I can’t do that anymore. Maybe next year.
Anyway, the divorce was in full flower of anger and hurt and passion that week, and for weeks and months to follow, and I wish I could say that is what had me so anxious that summer. If it was, I could chalk all this up to the uncertainty of surgery and the pain of recuperation.
Back then I made a note in one of the green fabric-covered notebooks I used to carry to try to organize my thoughts. In that summer, I was convinced that we were slow-waltzing to some sort of catastrophe. I could show you in the volume with “Aug 2001-Jan 2002” on the spine.
Things were falling apart as I wrote during a meeting in the basement of The Company about Intelligence Capabilities in the new Millennium. The date scrawled at the top of the page is 15 August, 2001. The date has an ink box around it for emphasis. I apparently had a lot on my mind. The words sear still.
“I have made an insightful and positive comment.” I wrote in the block letters of my meeting notes. “Which will buy me the time to go back to scribbling…my private and darker view if that things will fumble along as they are, driven by resources and narrow politics, until something awful happens. This is predicated on linear extrapolation- and that does not coincide with my understanding of history. That process lurches along in tectonic change- resistance to change being so formidable that until pressure builds inexorably to a trigger point that causes the whole fault line to rip and thrusts across a broad area….I despair in our ability to predict the unpredictable. The end of Israel? The loss of New York or Washington?”
There is more, of course, and the scrawl of later notes, part cursive and part block, accounts for the nature of The Day, but I won’t trouble you with that. It is still too raw and fresh to see it. I have not been back to these volumes until this very morning, which is as bright and fresh-washed as that other one.
So, I told you about the “It’s a Wonderful Life” epiphany. I was taking down the Christmas lights- don’t ask- and it struck me that seeing the Ex and the whole extended family and friends was exactly like the movie interlude in which George Bailey never existed. The sundering of all those connections made the decade fly away, and made me realize, dimly, the magnitude of what was lost in the attack.
The kids were grown and with children of their own. They had changed in profound ways, and yet the last connection I had with most of the in-laws and friends was a decade ago, and the memories exactly mingled with the monstrous evil. It felt as if I had been struck by a bus, or been working in an office in the new wedge of the Pentagon on a fine late-summer sunny day. And then gone.
It was weird. Now I have to go to work. I imagine the President or someone will be making remarks at the precise minute that American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, so I will try to be late.
This is a strange morning. It is so much like that one. Like I said, I have been feeling the same sort of anxious vibrations that I felt that summer not so long ago.
Like something is going to happen.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com