Psalm 27

The morning of September 11, 2001 started off as a blue and sunny day, but that all changed when the news announcements commenced to erupt on the radio as I drove to work. We all know what happened. Two hijacked planes struck the towers of the World Trade Center, and a third had struck The Pentagon. A fourth plane had been hijacked too, but at that time the whereabouts, or whether or not the plane had crashed, was still unconfirmed. I felt terror and confusion. Wasn't that the intent of terrorist acts, along with destruction of American lives and the centers of our military and financial institutions? The news was understandably frenzied, chaotic. I had worked in the towers several times for a couple of clients and also had spent more time there when I passed through them on my way to do a job in one of the New York City government offices. I often would eat lunch out front and gaze up at the dizzying height. The last time I had been in the towers was March 2000. I thought of the people who worked there and wondered if they were okay, or even alive. By the time I arrived at the office the radio announced that all US flights had been grounded.

At first the mood at work appeared to be like most any other day---somber and a bit dull. The office had a printer and copier room and a woman, the administrator of this room, was the only person visibly shaken and emotional about the attacks. She had set up a TV in the room and as fellow employees (nearly all middle-aged males like me) came into pick up their printouts, some one would stop and watch the TV for a few minutes and discuss the horror, or ask the woman questions as if she were an interpreter or a chorus for the unfolding tragedy. Incredibly, the first tower had collapsed, had fallen. It didn't seem possible. As much as I wanted to follow the news, I had a conference call with a customer and project team that I was hosting so I returned to my cubicle.

The call was miserable and disheartening. I was shocked by the attitudes of the attendees---mid-Westerners, or northern mid-Westerners---who said, "It must be really hard for you guys out there," as if the attacks were somehow only about New York, or at worst the East Coast, and not an attack against the United States, as if these smug, bland, bourgeois inhabitants of the nation's interior felt themselves safely insulated from the unraveling nightmare . . .  and maybe they were. I think their intention may have been to sound polite and sympathetic, but I frankly felt ashamed of them as compatriots, fellow countrymen, in the context of what was happening. Then, from the printer room, I heard the administrator's voice, a scream "Oh, no! The other one is falling!" Her voice sounded closer to a protracted moan than a scream as if she'd been wounded. I wrapped up the call and entered the printer room where a small group had gathered around the TV to watch the collapsing towers (hushed words, heads shaking in disbelief), the screen filled with smoke and firefighters and medics and other emergency responders and people fleeing the scene on foot and others injured or dead. A scene of unremitting chaos, tragedy, horror, and a collective depression worse than anything I'd seen in years. I decided I was done working for the day and left the office.

I drove home to check on the kids but no one was there. They entered the house a few minutes later having been let out of school. They were trying to process what had happened. My oldest son, age 14, talked about the time a year or two ago when he'd taken a class trip to New York and he and his teacher and classmates rode the elevator to the top of the World Trade Center. We had the television turned on for further reports.

 My wife arrived home around noon. We ate lunch and afterwards I drove to the nearest Red Cross center to donate blood. I'd been pondering the best act I could undertake during this crisis and donating blood felt more important to me than it ever had before. But when I reached the donation center the line was already a block long, and almost as soon as I joined the end of the line a Red Cross official came out of the building and informed everyone in the queue that they would not be accepting any more donors for the rest of the day and possibly the next day. I was slightly crestfallen. I'd wanted to donate blood, to make some small difference, but I understood the American Red Cross had much to deal with and were vitally competent in times of disaster and emergency throughout much of the world. I had to be consoled by the thought that I had tried.

As I walked back to my car a woman approached me, holding a bible and a card. Normally I would have refused to engage with these people or grant them the slightest opening because their intention was to convert you, to make you "born again." And yet because of the day, the moment, I stopped to hear the woman out. Surprisingly she did not try to convert me at all, no hard-sell or browbeating me into accepting Jesus as my personal savior. Instead she handed me the card which turned out to have a calendar on the back of it for the year 2001. The front of the card displayed an air-brushed illustration, a very characteristic alpine scene meant to bring comfort, and in script the line: The Lord is the strength of my life. Psalm 27 1:b. The full text of verse 1 is: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?  Given the day, the situation, the moment, I was profoundly moved by her gesture and thanked her. She had no further business with me and continued moving down the line to hand her cards out to others in need of a pause, time out, in need of balm.

Later, in the evening, I was startled by the silence, the absence of airplanes, because I lived beneath a flight route and was accustomed to planes overhead all the time. There was no air traffic anywhere and very little automobile traffic. The world had grown still and grieving, the night quieter than Christmas. I checked a 911 website for the names of the people I had worked for in both towers. Luckily they had survived.

I still have that card the woman gave me, a bookmark on Psalm 27 in my King James Bible.

Scenes from Summers Past - Part 3 Camp, Barry, and Samuel Morse

In my late teens and early 20's I worked one month each summer, for two summers, at a camp in Upstate New York. The camp was located in a fairly remote and wooded place on a quiet road about one mile from Hunter Mountain in the Catskills. The clientele, or campers, were diverse in regards to disabilities---Cerebral Palsy, Muscular Dystrophy, Spina Bifida, post-Polio, Multiple Sclerosis and mental retardation often combined with one of the other disabilities. I made some close friends working there and I maintained contact with them once camping season was over. We had sleep over visits and parties because most everyone lived in New York City or North Jersey. In these parties staff and younger campers drank a good deal and smoked a lot of pot and everyone generally became wasted and had a fine time.

I worked as a dishwasher in my first summer job at the camp. Between meals in the rec. hall I had ample time to interact with campers and assist counselors by lifting campers, folding or unfolding wheelchairs, feeding and other helping tasks. My mother had post-polio and was partially paralyzed so I didn't feel like a stranger in this environment or nervous or uncomfortable around people who needed my help, though the majority were more severely handicapped than my mother who was ambulatory. It seemed logical then that when I returned to camp the second summer I was hired as a counselor (and occasionally helped in the kitchen when needed).

Some campers had difficulty speaking; others flailed their limbs in uncontrolled spasms; more needed to be lifted in and out of bed, helped with eating and having their asses wiped or flushing a toilet and having their bed pans emptied and cleaned. One of the most challenging campers had severe C.P. that twisted, racked  and contorted his body into excruciating positions to the extent that he needed to be strapped into his wheelchair to keep from falling out. We'll call him Barry. Barry could not speak---his oral muscles were dysfunctional to the point where he could not form words---and while another camper who also couldn't speak had devised a method of pointing to letters on a Ouija Board to communicate, spelling out each word, Barry was too spastic to effectively use that method. Instead he had a wooden board attached to his chair that was seasoned with the dots and dashes of Morse Code. Barry would jerk his head upwards to communicate a "dot" and jerk his sideways for a "dash." Except for a brief period of time in boy scouts I knew little-to-no Morse Code, but I decided that I would try and learn it again, only this time I committed those dots and dashes to memory. Only one other counselor in the entire camp was able to talk to Barry without having to lift up the board on the wheelchair and read each dot and dash (way more time consuming and frustrating) so I felt that I could fill a void here and be the second person to memorize the code and that way there would be two of us working with Barry.

But mastering Morse code did not result in easy communications by any means. I would spend long, sometimes exhausting stretches in hot cabins or outside but separate from everyone, attempting a simple conversation with Barry. Sometimes his head movements would not clearly translate into a dot or a dash, and he'd become livid with anger, not so much at you but at himself and his predicament. His spasms and facial tics would become very pronounced, but he valued me and we worked together because I was only one of two people in the camp who could talk to him effectively, and often someone would come and get me if there was an emergency and Barry had been struggling to convey the problem to a different counselor. His expressions were mercurial and vehement. When he didn't like something---a certain food, or song, or movie---he screwed up his features in a raspberry, tongue thrust out. When something made him laugh his entire face would light up and you heard a bass undertone that was his voice, but no higher range or scale, as if his voice was the bass pedal notes on a church organ with no notes above them. And you knew when he was angry and apoplectic. As with mimes and deaf mutes, Barry needed to draw more heavily on a repertoire of facial expressions and body language to communicate emotion. His violent spasms and facial tics regularly got in the way of parsing the code, words, or gestures of what he'd been trying to get across.

After camp ended I decided I would visit Barry because he lived in Fort Lee, which was about 15 minutes from my house. I met Barry's mother, a cultured and urbane woman. Apparently Barry had told his mother a great deal about me and the other counselor, Jim. When I'd been out to visit twice, Barry's mother praised me for continuing to see him after camp, and she expressed disappointment that Jim hadn't visited at all. I wasn't completely surprised. I lived closed and Jim was somewhere out in Brooklyn or Queens, or farther out in the Bronx and needed to rely on mass transit to get to Fort Lee.

The cause of Barry's C.P. had been scarlet fever. It appeared that his mother gave birth to him when she was fairly old. The father was no longer alive but he'd been president of the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation (I believe that was it), and Barry's mother showed me photographs of successful awards dinners and fund raisers in which Barry was a "poster boy," literally, not in a pejorative sense. The mother talked about how dedicated and active she and her husband had been in the handicap organizations. She seemed reasonably well off, educated, and somewhat gentrified. I noticed she tended to speak about Barry and sometimes for Barry, a kind of intimate proxy, which I guess was natural given Barry's handicap. However, he often tried to interject if his mother was getting something wrong or putting words in his mouth. Despite all her good works and "calling" I sensed the mother's loneliness without her husband, and Barry's too. I understood the importance of upstate camp in Barry's life, and during my few visits he and I would leave the apartment and I'd wheel him to a park bench or outdoor cafe'. Needless to say, people stared. People always stare.

It may have been on one of my last visits when Barry's mother confided that they read books together, or more specifically that she read to him. Barry liked best sellers, or mysteries, or maybe a little science fiction, and perhaps in an effort to elevate him to "literature," his mother had read him "The Fall" by Albert Camus. In the autumn dusk that settled over the apartment she asked me if I had read "The Fall" and I had read it.
"It's a grand novel," she said, "so moving and packed with philosophy and observations about life and the human condition. Such a marvelous writer, and sadly taken from us so early . . . Barry didn't care for 'The Fall'" his mother added with some degree of patient indulgence concerning his aesthetics. "He didn't like it," she said, smiling fondly at him. At that moment I looked at Barry and he grimaced and stuck out his tongue, but you could see the laughter in his eyes, the playful mirth. It was a great subjective critique (Camus is important but we're all entitled to our likes and dislikes) and didn't require any Morse Code to decipher. I've never forgotten that look on his face.

Scenes from Summers Past - Part 2

Upstate New York 1962, 1963

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenville_(town),_New_York

My grandparents had an unfinished summer house north of Greenville. The house was secluded and covered the side of a hill---approximately 28 acres of rock ledge and bottom land. The area had many farms but also the resort hotels with wide lawns sprouting badminton nets, horseshoe pegs, and rectangles of clay or asphalt for playing shuffleboard. Mostly there were chairs: Rockers and straight backed wooden ones enclosing game tables on the long porches; metal chairs situated beneath maples, birches and elms that were often occupied with some of the fortunate members of the horde that had managed to make their exodus from New York City during the Dog Days of Summer. The more recent arrivals had complexions white as milk. They looked like aliens in the bright sunlight. They ate pastrami-on-rye sandwiches with kosher pickles and drank clear NEHI cream soda. Cousin Milton owned one of the small resort hotels.

My family would have a picnic table set up in the front yard, the house was unfinished, all framework inside and no steps into the front or side door. We used a step ladder. Ostensibly my father and uncle were up there to help my grandfather collect large flat stones from the fields or woods and then stack the stones into some crude steps before filling in with dirt or cement. A large amount of beer was normally consumed while engaged in this labor.

My grandmother’s and great aunt’s arms were large and white like dough---flabby, flaccid, the dewlaps of skin a pale rose, puckered in a few places like the freckled field of skin near the small pox vaccination. Owing to the large quantity of sweets my grandmother and aunt ingested, and the sheer size of their arms, those upper arms were perfect targets for mosquitoes---a heavenly field of loose, sugar-perfumed flesh  Each of their arms displayed numerous mosquito bites which my grandmother and great aunt had scratched until the pink bumps bled. Some of the bites were smothered in a dried plaster of baking soda or calamine lotion.

The lawn chairs had a plaid or tartan pattern on a plastic lattice that made up the seat and back, and there were always crinkled strands of that material unraveling from the edges of the straps. Occasionally one or two straps had snapped off the seat creating a gap in the lattice. Then, if someone whose butt was a size larger than bony happened to sit on the chair, one of two things would happen. Either there would be a comical bulge sagging through the bottom of the chair, or the gap would tear and continue to spread until someone’s butt burst through and they fell over and were stuck by the ass in the chair opening. The chairs were made of a cheap aluminum, and sometimes a frame would simply bend and break from wear or from a heavier person who did not sit in the chair correctly. The cheap aluminum frame would warp and buckle and ultimately collapse under the strain.

We had bologna and salami (Genoa with little chips of garlic) sandwiches and Hawaiian Punch and a Yoohoos and Friehofer’s crumb cake with custard filling or some éclairs spoiling in the summer afternoon heat, attracting legions of ants and hornets and flies. The women always used hairspray back then which the hornets were also intoxicatingly drawn to. I wasn't much interested in the woods at that time. There was no place to swim on my grandparents' property. I took a few walks and tried helping with collecting rocks to build stone steps, but mostly I hung out and drank Yoohoo and ate doughnuts with chocolate melting in the afternoon heat.

There were big plans for the wooded swampy property and house, but after the summer of 1964 my grandfather fell ill and died the following year, and the propety and house were put on hold for at least six years, until I returned with a caravan of friends in late August 1970 to spend a couple days of communing with nature, making huge campfires, playing period Woodstock Generation music on a tape player, feasting on somewhat healthier food, and taking acid or mescaline trips and enjoying other substances as well as beer and wine in the splendor of the Catskill Mountains.

Scenes from Summer Past - Part I Dark Satanic Mills

Scenes from Summers Past - Part I

Dark Satanic Mills 1973

And did the  Countenance Divine

  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark satanic mills?

--William Blake

In the summer of 1973 I worked in a paper mill. It was long, hard, hot work, six days a week and for two weeks in July you worked seven days a week for maintenance on the machinery when the mill stopped making paper. That added up to a 20-day work stretch for me before I had a single day off. And the mill was a hellish cesspool of carcinogens, machinery, heat, heat and heat, and deafening noise and hot water pumped into the nearest river killing fish in large numbers. 

Temperature inside the mill was normally 15 to 20 degrees hotter than it was outside, so during the summer if the afternoon temperature reached 95 then the temperature inside was likely to be 110 or 115 degrees where you were working and working hard, and if you stood near a roller---or worse---under a roller with the bath-like steam dampening your scalp, then the temperature was even higher. Paper would sometimes break off the roller stacks, long curling strips of paper corkscrewing or ribboning into a five-foot trench, the paper either wet or dry depending on the section of rollers where the paper had torn. The trench was appropriately nicknamed "the pit" and any broken paper in "the pit" was a problem to be avoided and removed at all costs because if too much paper sheared off the stacks twisting mounds, then the paper making machine would need to be stopped and that meant lost time which meant lost volume on product which meant lost money. So when a paper break occurred you would have to jump down into the trench known as the pit and begin lifting and bailing out the lost paper, sometimes heaving sodden clumps of it that would come apart in your hands like so much cellulose mush with scalding heat of the rollers mere inches from your skull and often turning as you worked, sweat pouring from the temples of your forehead, the corners of your eyes and dripping off your chin and nose and forming pools everywhere on your body. We drank absurdly large quantities of water and swallowed salt tablets to prevent dehydration, incurred nasty paper cuts from the dryer paper because even as we started with cloth gloves, the gloves were soon saturated with sweat and became ineffective, and as often as we nearly dropped and died under the heat, the tour boss or foreman would be standing right above you or occasionally bend over and thrust his head down to your sad level, shouting at you to work harder, faster, "get that shit out of here! don't stop! what the hell's wrong with you?" and the sweat and heat and boss shouting and it's 120 degrees and the scorching iron of a paper roller is about a half foot from your head.

That was the pit. At the finishing end of the machine, you had "the box" where finished box board sheets fell in neat stacks of various sizes into a bin and the paper then needed to be picked up---fast and with both hands---and placed on a pallet---neatly and fast---until the pallet was full then it could be weighed and bound with metal strapping. Unlike the pit the box was at least above ground, but you needed to focus constantly (no daydreaming or sexual fantasies here) and lift a lot of box board sheets at one time and if you lifted too many you may drop them or they may slide off the pallet when you tried to stack them. So one needed speed, strength, and good judgement. 

When the mill closed for two weeks we worked on heavy machinery. The most ridiculous of the maintenance jobs was to remove hard dried pimples or encrusted barnacles of pulp from a beater or turbine simply using a scraper and wire brush. One time I took turns with a couple other hands using a jackhammer to break up a square block of concrete that was several inches high. Mostly I assisted the welder. Whenever the welder made a weld you were supposed to wear a mask to prevent looking directly at the arc welding which could damage your eyes. Once, after a number of days working with him, I forgot to shield my eyes, and I'd also had only three hours sleep the night before having been drinking and partying over at a friends place in New York. Whatever the reason, when I awoke from a dream later that night I was unable to see temporarily, and I became frightened and confused. 

There were a number of characters who worked in the mill but I'll just mention two. The first was Gene, who maintained the skid yard where pallets were repaired and moved about with a forklift and delivered across the road to the mill to be weighed and used to hold stacks of box board. Gene had killed a couple men in a bar fight in the South, and had been serving a life sentence when his case was appealed and the charge of murder 1 had been reduced  to manslaughter (either on new evidence, or a new witness, I'm not sure) and Gene was released after a shorter period of time. He did have a temper and he was strong, but for the most part Gene was extremely kind and considerate. His wife was from Ireland and they took trips over there every couple years and Gene would always bring back a small gift for my father. The other person was a mechanic named Daryl from West Virginia. Daryl wore a yellow hard hat with the word "Coming" written on the front of the hat and the word "Going" written on the back. He had no hair. He walked with a slow but steady gait so that his position of coming or going could always be determined. Bald and slightly overweight, about 40 years of age, Daryl had lived on the poor coal mining Appalachian diet for years, a diet not known for being "heart smart," consisting largely of grease fat or lard, other fat, salt and sugar. And the benzene and chloride vapors and other noxious chemicals in the environment certainly didn't help. Daryl dropped dead at work. He took medication for epileptic seizures, and a couple times in the past he'd skipped his medication while at work and went into seizure and needed to be wrestled to the ground to keep from hurting himself. In the first few seconds when the heart attack struck, his co-workers mistakenly misread the coronary explosion for another epileptic seizure, but it became apparent after a few seconds that Daryl had not had a seizure and by then it was too late because he'd stopped moving altogether and would no longer be coming or going.

Katje and her Kids

When my oldest son was a toddler I used to take him to a woman who watched children instead of a random but licensed daycare center. This was in the late 1980s. The woman was named Katje, about 50 years old, and she'd originally come from the Netherlands. She and her husband, Derek, were two of the sweetest and kindest people I had ever known, and my wife and I never worried that our son and later our twins were not safe in their care.

I remember a large play area with a TV, and outside an enclosed deck where the kids played during warmer weather. The TV normally would be tuned to Sesame Street for the kids each morning when I dropped my son off. Toys and games were carefully scattered about among half a dozen toddlers, some completely engrossed in their toy, one or two staring at the TV or alternately staring at the TV and playing with their toy. It was a bright colorful but not especially noisy scene for a group of very small kids. Katje's mother Ooma was usually at the house to help, and the entire atmosphere for a daycare place felt easy and relaxed. I often lingered for five or ten minutes in the morning to talk with the two of them. Sometimes I would join them for a cup of coffee.

You might be thinking that under such circumstances nothing could go wrong, and you'd be right at least as far as the children were concerned. No accidents or mistakes, no arguments between parents and Katje, at least to my knowledge. I knew that Katje was a grandmother, and occasionally I would see her daughter in the morning when she dropped off the grandchild.

I normally entered the house through a side door that opened onto the kitchen which adjoined the playroom where Katje watched the babies and toddlers. To my right was a short hallway with family pictures hanging on its wall. I recognized high school pictures and college pictures. I had seen one of the sons because he was living at home and attended Drexel, but there was another son, about age 18, whom I hadn't seen, probably at high school. My gaze would often linger on his face.

One morning, I'd been preparing to leave but paused a moment to stare at the family portraits because Katje had been telling me about her daughter.

"You have three children," I remarked.

Katje looked shocked. "Two," she said.

"Really. I thought you had three for some reason."

"No, just two---Marie and Geoffrey."

"Then who is this?" I asked, pointing.

Katje stepped out of the kitchen and into the hallway. She immediately caught my faux pas.

"Oh, that was James," she told me. "He was killed in a car accident when he was 18 years old."

I was stunned and embarrassed, ashamed of my curiosity, of my being nosy. In all the mornings I'd taken my son to her house, I had never once seen this young man, this son, and Katje had never mentioned him. I felt as if I hadn't been paying close enough attention. I said I was sorry, maybe profoundly sorry. An awkward moment.

"Was it his fault?"

The question instantly struck me as stupid and irrelevant as soon at it escaped my lips, but Katje didn't appear angry with me or hurt.

"It was his fault," she said with a stern nod of her head. "He drove 100 miles an hour on Townsend Boulevard where the speed limit is 35. He was alone. He drove the car into a tree, and a telephone pole, and part of someone's fence. Thank God no one else was hurt . . . only him. . . ."

Who knows what may have happened that evening causing James to drive so crazily fast that he ended his short life? Had he been drinking? Did he often race his car at such high speeds? Did he have emotional problems or problems at school? Had there been an argument with his parents beforehand? Or a fight with his girlfriend? The information would not be forthcoming for such a private matter. Previously there had been an unconscious riddle or puzzle whenever I'd looked at James's face, but now all I could do was note the face, the expression, and be keenly aware of the loss, the son's and brother's life cut short within the same year as his high school portrait.

*

Each year in early December Katje and Derek would have a Christmas party for the kids she took care of and their parents---a near perfect holiday mood for several reasons, one of them being that the parents had a chance to talk and interact and possibly make friends outside of the routine of passing one another when dropping off or picking up their kids. Katje's daughter and grandchild were also at the party and there was a lovely sense of family. Katje had Christmas presents for all her infants and toddlers arranged neatly beneath the Christmas tree, and she also had small gifts for the parents. She and Derek had a table spread with an ample amount and variety of holiday food and beer and wine. Christmas music played on the stereo and a fire blazed and crackled in the fireplace.