Some late election news broke over the Thanksgiving weekend. “Did you hear Gregorio lost?” my brother asked me. That sounded absurd. I told him he must have read it wrong. But there it was on the Internet.
The Hon. John T. Gregorio, the Democrat who has served on and off as the mayor of Linden, N.J., since 1968, lost his bid for a ninth term on Nov. 7. He lost by 74 votes out of some 9,000 cast, to a city councilman and former ally who ran as an independent.
Linden is a city of about 35,000 in Union County, just south of Newark International Airport, with about as many Navajo as Republicans. During the opening credits of “The Sopranos,” Tony drives down the New Jersey Turnpike past several huge oil tanks. That’s Linden. It’s working-class Jersey all the way, largely Polish and Italian. The city is proud of its petroleum industry, less so of its hazardous-waste disposal facilities. It was at one time home to Safety-Kleen and GAF and a huge General Motors plant. It rivals Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for good Polish delis.
My first job as a reporter was covering Linden in the mid-1990s, and dealing with Gregorio was always a guilty pleasure, so much so that I used to entertain my family with retellings of our conversations. He would call me every week and holler, “Ducklisss! Tiss is Johnny Gee!” He looked like a chiseled Ernest Borgnine. Kids and old people loved him, and everyone else kind of put up with him. Nobody serious challenged him.
His first stint as mayor lasted 15 years, until, as the Newark Star-Ledger put it, “he was convicted for hiding a financial interest in two Linden go-go bars.” It was a felony, and the mayor, who was also the region’s state senator, was given a time-out. He paid a fine and spent two years on probation, until 1990, when then-Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican, pardoned him. Why? Don’t ask. Kean never discussed it publicly. There were all kinds of rumors.
So Gregorio ran again and won again and served another 15 years, uninterrupted and unindicted — a raid of his office by the feds here and there notwithstanding, it proved invaluable to have nothing but Democratic attorneys general in the Garden State — until this year, when he was finally bested by Richard Gerbounka, a retired Linden police captain.
I remembered Gerbounka’s name but not my impression of him. (It’s been more than 10 years, after all. By 2016, God willing, I’ll have forgotten everything I know about Dorothy Goosby.) I read that he was part of the Gregorio team until they had a falling out.
With his victory, Gerbounka promised sweeping reforms. On his Web site, www.richformayor.com, he listed some of Gregorio’s more exotic schemes while pledging, if elected, to institute a hiring freeze, cut the mayor’s salary and “Eliminate the practice of providing the Mayor with a new Cadillac every 2 years as we do now.”
Times must be good. When I was there it was a Buick Park Avenue.
“I will never order the staff of our Public Works Department to snow plow personal driveways,” Gerbounka further vowed. “They will be dedicated to keeping the streets of Linden clear and safe for the public, not wasting time and tax dollars at the Mayor’s home.”
Well, I’m glad for the people of Linden. Gerbounka may be the real deal, but he owes his career to Gregorio, and there’s no reason to believe this election will change the political culture there or even that this election was any mandate for change: Gregorio is now 80, and he barely campaigned and still almost won.
But I think what happened in Linden is what could someday happen to Long Island: the machines finally got older than the population. Gregorio certainly wasn't self-made, and the political infrastructure a hack like him needed was crumbling. People were tired of being embarrassed by their government.
We on the South Shore, on the other hand, remain contented to be embarrassed. Who was the last incumbent around here to lose an election? On Nov. 7 we re-elected all of our assemblymen, state senators and congresspeople, including a couple of true boneheads. Last year we returned to office the entire county Legislature and Hempstead Town Council. The Long Beach Demo-crats, on the outs for two years after ruling for 40, easily took back power in 2005, and Tom Suozzi’s Democrats now have the same hold on Nassau County that Kate Murray’s Republicans have on the Town of Hempstead. The margins of victory in each election remain vast, largely because the improbability of an upset scares away qualified challengers.
Eventually those young families who aren’t taxed right off Long Island will decide not to put up with what their parents put up with. They’ll see the guy mowing a town park while wearing a GOP T-shirt and not just chalk it up to the way things are. They’ll see a staff photographer follow an elected official to church the same week they get their tax bill and decide they’ve had enough.
History will decide whether Linden gets the reformer its voters think they elected. Someday a slate of real reformers will courageously present themselves to the voters of Nassau County. Perhaps the voters, just as courageously, might give them a shot.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
The blackheart who voted for Hillary, and other tales
So here’s something I’m going to regret: I voted for Hillary Clinton.
I don’t live upstate anymore and I don’t pretend to be an expert — well, OK, I sometimes pretend — but supposedly my fellow blackhearted conservatives who sit on the board of Corning Inc. are thrilled with Hillary, and have even raised money for her. Good enough. I took the plunge.
It’s noteworthy that a junior senator in the minority party had enough juice to steer defense and aerospace contracts to upstate employers. Yea, Hillary. (But I’m obviously not voting for her for president. No way.)
I voted third-party for governor and attorney general, since the four major candidates combined didn’t equal one Pete King. Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer, since you asked, got where he is by demonizing successful people for political gain. The word for that is McCarthyism. Spitzer went after Wall Street — because everybody hates Wall Street — but did nothing about the government corruption he was elected to fix. The word for that is hypocrisy. Medicaid? Yup, still broken.
Write me letters and tell me I’m wrong. I’ll print them all. But I think I’m right.
***
Trivia question: What do Shaquille O’Neal, Bill Gates and Britney Spears have in common?
The answer is they’re celebrities who have donated their likenesses to the American Library Association, which produces posters for member branches featuring stars who promote literacy and encourage young people to read.
But when visitors entered the lobby of the Long Beach Library in the weeks leading up to the election, whose smiling face did they see on such a poster? It was every 11-year-old’s idol: Democratic Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg, holding a book.
We’re all probably a bit numbed by how readily elected officials will dance around their ethical obligations. In this case, the poster complied with the letter of the law in that it was not, technically, campaign material on display in a taxpayer-funded library. But the spirit of the law — and really, decency itself — has been thrown under a train.
Weisenberg is just one of scores of lawmakers who posed for these posters, which were distributed free to libraries across the state by the New York Library Association, a lobbying group that knew vanity would not be in short supply in Albany in an election year. More than 80 representatives from both parties took the lobbyists up on the opportunity to model, according to the group’s Web site, and one of them was Weisenberg.
We would give a less unctuous lawmaker a pass, but for Weisenberg this is just the latest in a series of affronts to good taste. No one should need reminding that this is the man who haunted commuters for years with a questionably financed billboard featuring himself in a Speedo.
If Weisenberg wants to support literacy, he could direct more state aid toward upgrading the library’s facilities, buying new computers, books, periodicals and, yes, literacy posters featuring celebrities that young people might actually want to emulate.
Nobody on Long Island can claim to be shocked any more at the lengths to which elected officials will go to appear in print, but I must say I expected a little better of the library. Whether or not the people who run it support Weisenberg is immaterial; the poster, displayed as prominently as it is — it’s still up — is nothing if not a tacit endorsement. Weisenberg’s opponent last week, Republican Francis X. McQuade, would have faced ejection and possible arrest if he had tried to put a poster of himself up in the library.
The facility’s director, George Trepp, offered this admittedly fair response: “What if it was a poster of George W. Bush?”
To be sure, President Bush, his wife, his mother and all of his recent predecessors of both parties have appeared, honorably, in just this type of promotion. But no matter what you may think of the current president, his is an office people respect and to which they aspire. We seriously doubt young readers are inspired by — or, more to the point, were the intended target of — the assemblyman’s poster.
I don’t live upstate anymore and I don’t pretend to be an expert — well, OK, I sometimes pretend — but supposedly my fellow blackhearted conservatives who sit on the board of Corning Inc. are thrilled with Hillary, and have even raised money for her. Good enough. I took the plunge.
It’s noteworthy that a junior senator in the minority party had enough juice to steer defense and aerospace contracts to upstate employers. Yea, Hillary. (But I’m obviously not voting for her for president. No way.)
I voted third-party for governor and attorney general, since the four major candidates combined didn’t equal one Pete King. Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer, since you asked, got where he is by demonizing successful people for political gain. The word for that is McCarthyism. Spitzer went after Wall Street — because everybody hates Wall Street — but did nothing about the government corruption he was elected to fix. The word for that is hypocrisy. Medicaid? Yup, still broken.
Write me letters and tell me I’m wrong. I’ll print them all. But I think I’m right.
***
Trivia question: What do Shaquille O’Neal, Bill Gates and Britney Spears have in common?
The answer is they’re celebrities who have donated their likenesses to the American Library Association, which produces posters for member branches featuring stars who promote literacy and encourage young people to read.
But when visitors entered the lobby of the Long Beach Library in the weeks leading up to the election, whose smiling face did they see on such a poster? It was every 11-year-old’s idol: Democratic Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg, holding a book.
We’re all probably a bit numbed by how readily elected officials will dance around their ethical obligations. In this case, the poster complied with the letter of the law in that it was not, technically, campaign material on display in a taxpayer-funded library. But the spirit of the law — and really, decency itself — has been thrown under a train.
Weisenberg is just one of scores of lawmakers who posed for these posters, which were distributed free to libraries across the state by the New York Library Association, a lobbying group that knew vanity would not be in short supply in Albany in an election year. More than 80 representatives from both parties took the lobbyists up on the opportunity to model, according to the group’s Web site, and one of them was Weisenberg.
We would give a less unctuous lawmaker a pass, but for Weisenberg this is just the latest in a series of affronts to good taste. No one should need reminding that this is the man who haunted commuters for years with a questionably financed billboard featuring himself in a Speedo.
If Weisenberg wants to support literacy, he could direct more state aid toward upgrading the library’s facilities, buying new computers, books, periodicals and, yes, literacy posters featuring celebrities that young people might actually want to emulate.
Nobody on Long Island can claim to be shocked any more at the lengths to which elected officials will go to appear in print, but I must say I expected a little better of the library. Whether or not the people who run it support Weisenberg is immaterial; the poster, displayed as prominently as it is — it’s still up — is nothing if not a tacit endorsement. Weisenberg’s opponent last week, Republican Francis X. McQuade, would have faced ejection and possible arrest if he had tried to put a poster of himself up in the library.
The facility’s director, George Trepp, offered this admittedly fair response: “What if it was a poster of George W. Bush?”
To be sure, President Bush, his wife, his mother and all of his recent predecessors of both parties have appeared, honorably, in just this type of promotion. But no matter what you may think of the current president, his is an office people respect and to which they aspire. We seriously doubt young readers are inspired by — or, more to the point, were the intended target of — the assemblyman’s poster.
Silly stats and anecdotes for those who love them
Gun nuts and gun-control nuts — like abortion nuts and anti-abortion nuts — are fond of meaningless statistics, so here’s one: Of the four Long Beach homicides the Herald has covered since 2003, only one involved a gun. But lawmakers don’t pay attention to meaningless stats; they pay attention to meaningless anecdotes. So here are a few of those:
Two weeks ago, a young man stood at the gun counter at Dick’s Sporting Goods in the Roosevelt Field Mall, returning a weapon he had apparently just bought. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and an annoyed look. His annoyance was aimed at the woman with him, who looked to be his mother. They hardly spoke, but when they did, it was in something Baltic-sounding.
If the son’s demeanor was that of an assimilated young American — picture a lot of eye-rolling — his mother was anything but. Dressed frumpily and wringing her hands, she was clearly in distress with the way he was dressed, his dismissive tone and, most of all, the gun. Clearly, its mere presence had turned her home upside down, and she wouldn’t relax until it was gone.
Another anecdote: A day or two later, The New York Times ran an exhaustive account of state police efforts to catch fugitive accused murderer Bucky Phillips up in Chautauqua County, a mostly wooded part of western New York. Phillips had evolved from petty thief to folk hero with his daring escape from a local lockup. His daughter had lost custody of her children and he busted out, local gossip had it, to help her get her kids back.
Then Phillips killed a cop. Suddenly he lost his folksy cachet, and the cheeseburger named for him (“available only to go,” the waitress had told the Times with a wink) stopped selling. A local grocer summed up the community’s mood shift, saying, “He’s a dead man walking. Everyone around here has guns. If anybody sees him, they’re going to shoot him.” Phillips, perhaps crazy but apparently not stupid, surrendered the next day.
Meanwhile, last week a suburban South Shore couple — that would be my wife and I — stopped in a sporting goods store outside Plattsburgh en route to a camping trip near Montreal. Compared with Dick’s in Roosevelt Field, this store was an armory: rows and rows of rifles, shotguns and pistols of every size and caliber. Among the rifles, one stood out. It was half as long as the rest, and painted bright pink.
There was the rifle, and below it our 2-year-old daughter played on the floor with her Polly Pocket doll. Can you imagine? we asked each other on the way to the parking lot. We enjoyed our moment of enlightenment as we left, thinking, This is just how this part of the world is.
When we got to Montreal, it was no longer part of that world, as the city was picking itself up after its third school-shooting rampage since 1989. On Sept. 13, Kimveer Gill, a 25-year-old Goth, stormed the campus of a college he had never attended and started shooting, killing 18-year-old Anastasia DeSousa and wounding 19 others before killing himself.
Gill’s weapon was a Beretta CX4 Storm, which he apparently bought legally in Canada. It’s an assault weapon, currently legal in both the U.S. and Canada with the right permits. Gill, who was a member of a Montreal gun club, had “passed all government safety tests and qualified for a firearms license,” the Toronto Star reported, not without a hint of indignation.
No doubt by the time the ink dries on this Herald, a Montreal M.P. will have drafted legislation outlawing the CX4 and weapons like it, perhaps calling it “Ana’s Law.” The Star and newspapers like it will endorse it, and it will no doubt pass. But it won’t matter to Anastasia’s parents. And it won’t stop the next guy, who will find a way to do whatever he is driven to do, whatever it takes.
DeSousa will have died for nothing if the sum of her legacy is as the girl who inspired the latest, toothless gun ban. Most gun owners are like the good people of Plattsburgh and Chautauqua, and most murders are unpreventable.
And most parents are not as apparently clueless as Gill’s mother. CTV.com reported that she was taken aback by her son’s antisocial behavior: “She says she had no idea her son was harbouring such dark thoughts,” the Web site reported. If there is a solution to any of this, it starts with parents being like that woman at Dick’s, whose use of Old World parenting techniques led her son to do the right thing.
Back to our own meaningless statistic, the use of a gun in only one of the last four Long Beach homicides. The other weapons were a kitchen knife, a pickup truck and the lethal combination of frying pan and staircase. Incidentally, the driver of the pickup had at one point also “passed all government safety tests” and had a valid driver’s license. But the 15 or so drinks he had that night provoked their own unimaginably dark thoughts.
Two weeks ago, a young man stood at the gun counter at Dick’s Sporting Goods in the Roosevelt Field Mall, returning a weapon he had apparently just bought. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and an annoyed look. His annoyance was aimed at the woman with him, who looked to be his mother. They hardly spoke, but when they did, it was in something Baltic-sounding.
If the son’s demeanor was that of an assimilated young American — picture a lot of eye-rolling — his mother was anything but. Dressed frumpily and wringing her hands, she was clearly in distress with the way he was dressed, his dismissive tone and, most of all, the gun. Clearly, its mere presence had turned her home upside down, and she wouldn’t relax until it was gone.
Another anecdote: A day or two later, The New York Times ran an exhaustive account of state police efforts to catch fugitive accused murderer Bucky Phillips up in Chautauqua County, a mostly wooded part of western New York. Phillips had evolved from petty thief to folk hero with his daring escape from a local lockup. His daughter had lost custody of her children and he busted out, local gossip had it, to help her get her kids back.
Then Phillips killed a cop. Suddenly he lost his folksy cachet, and the cheeseburger named for him (“available only to go,” the waitress had told the Times with a wink) stopped selling. A local grocer summed up the community’s mood shift, saying, “He’s a dead man walking. Everyone around here has guns. If anybody sees him, they’re going to shoot him.” Phillips, perhaps crazy but apparently not stupid, surrendered the next day.
Meanwhile, last week a suburban South Shore couple — that would be my wife and I — stopped in a sporting goods store outside Plattsburgh en route to a camping trip near Montreal. Compared with Dick’s in Roosevelt Field, this store was an armory: rows and rows of rifles, shotguns and pistols of every size and caliber. Among the rifles, one stood out. It was half as long as the rest, and painted bright pink.
There was the rifle, and below it our 2-year-old daughter played on the floor with her Polly Pocket doll. Can you imagine? we asked each other on the way to the parking lot. We enjoyed our moment of enlightenment as we left, thinking, This is just how this part of the world is.
When we got to Montreal, it was no longer part of that world, as the city was picking itself up after its third school-shooting rampage since 1989. On Sept. 13, Kimveer Gill, a 25-year-old Goth, stormed the campus of a college he had never attended and started shooting, killing 18-year-old Anastasia DeSousa and wounding 19 others before killing himself.
Gill’s weapon was a Beretta CX4 Storm, which he apparently bought legally in Canada. It’s an assault weapon, currently legal in both the U.S. and Canada with the right permits. Gill, who was a member of a Montreal gun club, had “passed all government safety tests and qualified for a firearms license,” the Toronto Star reported, not without a hint of indignation.
No doubt by the time the ink dries on this Herald, a Montreal M.P. will have drafted legislation outlawing the CX4 and weapons like it, perhaps calling it “Ana’s Law.” The Star and newspapers like it will endorse it, and it will no doubt pass. But it won’t matter to Anastasia’s parents. And it won’t stop the next guy, who will find a way to do whatever he is driven to do, whatever it takes.
DeSousa will have died for nothing if the sum of her legacy is as the girl who inspired the latest, toothless gun ban. Most gun owners are like the good people of Plattsburgh and Chautauqua, and most murders are unpreventable.
And most parents are not as apparently clueless as Gill’s mother. CTV.com reported that she was taken aback by her son’s antisocial behavior: “She says she had no idea her son was harbouring such dark thoughts,” the Web site reported. If there is a solution to any of this, it starts with parents being like that woman at Dick’s, whose use of Old World parenting techniques led her son to do the right thing.
Back to our own meaningless statistic, the use of a gun in only one of the last four Long Beach homicides. The other weapons were a kitchen knife, a pickup truck and the lethal combination of frying pan and staircase. Incidentally, the driver of the pickup had at one point also “passed all government safety tests” and had a valid driver’s license. But the 15 or so drinks he had that night provoked their own unimaginably dark thoughts.
Mark the anniversary with the TV off
Memories, which are never reliable to begin with, fade. Facts turn out not to be. Names are lost. Images blur.
On West 43rd Street, about halfway between Grand Central Terminal and Times Square, there was an office building surrounded by other office buildings. This one had a plaque near the door saying that it was once the headquarters of The New Yorker magazine. It still had the mechanical elevator installed by William Shawn, and literary tourists and the current tenants were shooed away from it.
On the sixth floor was a public relations firm operating out of a suite of offices whose windows overlooked West 43rd. In one of those offices were two of the firm’s young vice presidents, a P.R. euphemism for “employees.” I was one of them.
About the other one: He was heavy-set, perhaps five years older than me. He wore a white dress shirt every day but put on a tie only when he went to meet with clients. His shirts were, without fail, pit-stained. He had been a reporter for Dow Jones before switching to P.R. He had an irrational love of Rutgers football. He mumbled about “liberals.”
It’s positively strange that I remember all of this. I could go on and on about him. But don’t ask me his name; it’s gone. I have no idea and haven’t for years. This is what I mean: Memory is chaotic, sometimes cruel and often unreliable.
I lost no one on Sept. 11, 2001. I am far less qualified to consecrate or memorialize the day and its meaning than most, and I won’t try. But to tame the chaos of fading memories, I submit two of mine from that time and place. A year of working in public relations in 2001 had domesticated my journalist’s instincts, and I no longer carried around a notepad or a camera. So I missed out on the chance to record what I experienced.
That morning, my now nameless office mate, with great effort, managed to track down his wife. She was shaken but fine. All of our downtown clients, including those who worked in the World Trade Center towers, were OK.
At around 11 a.m., about the time the phones died, I stood up from my desk and looked out the window, down at West 43rd Street. It looked like the Verazzano on Marathon Sunday. My memory says thousands, but it was more likely hundreds of people. All dressed in business attire. All running for their lives. Full sprints, trying to get away from Grand Central Terminal, the fast elbowing past the slow.
After the second plane had hit, we started to hear the fighter jets buzzing overhead. From our conference room the skyscrapers and signage of Times Square were visible, and for an hour or so we sat alternately watching the news and staring at the back of the Conde Nast building, waiting for the flash of white that would end the world. Then Giuliani came on the TV and said the attack was over and the rest of us would be spared. Strangely, we believed him.
But those people running down West 43rd surely didn’t. Something happened in Grand Central Terminal that spooked them. Maybe it was an announcement, but more likely it was a rumor that led to the stampede. I never found out, and there was nothing about it on the news. I’ve never met anyone else who remembers it. So you’ve probably read about it here first, almost five years later.
Another memory: Against orders, I went to work the next morning. I walked out of Penn Station on Sept. 12, 2001, and stood on Sixth Avenue, in the middle of a ghost town. All the way up Sixth to Central Park, and all the way south as far as I could see, there were no people. No cars, taxis or buses. Perfect quiet. It wasn’t even like a movie, because at the movies you can tell yourself it’s only a movie.
Nowadays, I say it “looked PhotoShop-ed,” which is really an admission that I lack the vocabulary to convey the moment’s impact. It’s also a dodge, a distraction to cover the fact that my memory of the details has faded irrevocably. I don’t remember what side street I came up, or where on Sixth I was standing, or how I even got there. Did I take the subway? Was it even running that morning? I have no idea.
The point is, the pain of loss fades far more gradually than the memories. This anniversary will be marked by the television networks’ insistence on replaying the footage of the airplanes and talking heads telling us how to feel.
Turn off the TV. Instead, rely on your own experiences from that day, how you wept for your friends, your city and your country. That’s what’s real.
On West 43rd Street, about halfway between Grand Central Terminal and Times Square, there was an office building surrounded by other office buildings. This one had a plaque near the door saying that it was once the headquarters of The New Yorker magazine. It still had the mechanical elevator installed by William Shawn, and literary tourists and the current tenants were shooed away from it.
On the sixth floor was a public relations firm operating out of a suite of offices whose windows overlooked West 43rd. In one of those offices were two of the firm’s young vice presidents, a P.R. euphemism for “employees.” I was one of them.
About the other one: He was heavy-set, perhaps five years older than me. He wore a white dress shirt every day but put on a tie only when he went to meet with clients. His shirts were, without fail, pit-stained. He had been a reporter for Dow Jones before switching to P.R. He had an irrational love of Rutgers football. He mumbled about “liberals.”
It’s positively strange that I remember all of this. I could go on and on about him. But don’t ask me his name; it’s gone. I have no idea and haven’t for years. This is what I mean: Memory is chaotic, sometimes cruel and often unreliable.
I lost no one on Sept. 11, 2001. I am far less qualified to consecrate or memorialize the day and its meaning than most, and I won’t try. But to tame the chaos of fading memories, I submit two of mine from that time and place. A year of working in public relations in 2001 had domesticated my journalist’s instincts, and I no longer carried around a notepad or a camera. So I missed out on the chance to record what I experienced.
That morning, my now nameless office mate, with great effort, managed to track down his wife. She was shaken but fine. All of our downtown clients, including those who worked in the World Trade Center towers, were OK.
At around 11 a.m., about the time the phones died, I stood up from my desk and looked out the window, down at West 43rd Street. It looked like the Verazzano on Marathon Sunday. My memory says thousands, but it was more likely hundreds of people. All dressed in business attire. All running for their lives. Full sprints, trying to get away from Grand Central Terminal, the fast elbowing past the slow.
After the second plane had hit, we started to hear the fighter jets buzzing overhead. From our conference room the skyscrapers and signage of Times Square were visible, and for an hour or so we sat alternately watching the news and staring at the back of the Conde Nast building, waiting for the flash of white that would end the world. Then Giuliani came on the TV and said the attack was over and the rest of us would be spared. Strangely, we believed him.
But those people running down West 43rd surely didn’t. Something happened in Grand Central Terminal that spooked them. Maybe it was an announcement, but more likely it was a rumor that led to the stampede. I never found out, and there was nothing about it on the news. I’ve never met anyone else who remembers it. So you’ve probably read about it here first, almost five years later.
Another memory: Against orders, I went to work the next morning. I walked out of Penn Station on Sept. 12, 2001, and stood on Sixth Avenue, in the middle of a ghost town. All the way up Sixth to Central Park, and all the way south as far as I could see, there were no people. No cars, taxis or buses. Perfect quiet. It wasn’t even like a movie, because at the movies you can tell yourself it’s only a movie.
Nowadays, I say it “looked PhotoShop-ed,” which is really an admission that I lack the vocabulary to convey the moment’s impact. It’s also a dodge, a distraction to cover the fact that my memory of the details has faded irrevocably. I don’t remember what side street I came up, or where on Sixth I was standing, or how I even got there. Did I take the subway? Was it even running that morning? I have no idea.
The point is, the pain of loss fades far more gradually than the memories. This anniversary will be marked by the television networks’ insistence on replaying the footage of the airplanes and talking heads telling us how to feel.
Turn off the TV. Instead, rely on your own experiences from that day, how you wept for your friends, your city and your country. That’s what’s real.
Monday, November 20, 2006
For Heather, Katie and little Jacqueline
The poet Wyatt Prunty, of whom I’ve recently become a fan, is a professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and that’s something to think about: A man of that talent must make his living teaching poetry to bored engineering students. Meanwhile, Suzanne Somers owns the best-seller list.
As an example of Prunty’s talent, here’s a poem of his called “Learning the Bicycle,” which was dedicated “for Heather.” I assume she’s his daughter, although I couldn’t find any information about Prunty’s family.
The older children pedal past
Stable as little gyros, spinning hard
To supper, bath, and bed, until at last
We also quit, silent and tired
Beside the darkening yard where trees
Now shadow up instead of down.
Their predictable lengths can only tease
Her as, head lowered, she walks her bike alone
Somewhere between her wanting to ride
And her certainty she will always fall.
Tomorrow, though I will run behind,
Arms out to catch her, she’ll tilt then balance wide
Of my reach, till distance makes her small,
Smaller, beyond the place I stop and know
That to teach her I had to follow
And when she learned I had to let her go.
This poem has been eating at me since I first encountered it about six months ago. The big emotional blow comes in the final two lines (Is that a couplet? I'm not really a poetry guy), where the narrator arrives at his conclusion about the need to let go. He’s preparing himself, as we all must, for that melancholic sucker punch that accompanies change. That one keeps me up at night.
But that’s not the hardest part of the poem — at least not anymore. It’s that first word in line 11. Tomorrow.
It’s written with the hope that his daughter will succeed. The entire poem is based on the premise that all of this will happen, that tomorrow can be counted on, which is a premise that lately has felt difficult to support. What assurance, after all, does he have? How can he be sure he’ll still be there for her? How can he be sure his daughter ...?
Boy, nobody should be thinking like this. A year of reading and writing stories about Katie Flynn, the 7-year-old Lido Beach girl who was killed by a drunk driver, colors all discussions about parenthood and faith and the future. Imagining what that little girl’s parents went through — are still going through — turns everything black.
A friend of mine says there is relief to be found in the example set by the Amish, who say they have already forgiven the gunman who murdered their little girls in last month’s school shooting. An Amish midwife who was present for the births of two of the slain girls told ABC News, “If you have Jesus in your heart and he has forgiven you ... [how] can you not forgive other people?”
My answer would be, because it’s never that simple. Pain fades at its own pace. The fear that the pain will never leave creates its own anguish, and it’s all very real. Still, it seems like the Amish, who on one hand might appear to be simply denying that agony, are on to something.
Their faith sounds rooted in the belief that the pain will fade even when it is still so fresh that it feels like it never will. If they truly have that level of faith, then I’m jealous.
But I’m heartened by the example of my wife, who lost both parents and her oldest brother within a few years of one another. Since then, she has become a mother. She has said that having a child, knowing how suddenly and horribly things can end, was a radical act of hope — the ultimate expression of the faith that life was still worth showing up for. And the rest of her family has expanded, too: She now has a dozen nieces and nephews, and her cousins are all having children.
In fact, we got a call last week about a new arrival, another cousin, another little girl, in Bellmore. Welcome to the family, Jacqueline Elizabeth, and try to remember that nobody is born knowing how to ride a bike.
As an example of Prunty’s talent, here’s a poem of his called “Learning the Bicycle,” which was dedicated “for Heather.” I assume she’s his daughter, although I couldn’t find any information about Prunty’s family.
The older children pedal past
Stable as little gyros, spinning hard
To supper, bath, and bed, until at last
We also quit, silent and tired
Beside the darkening yard where trees
Now shadow up instead of down.
Their predictable lengths can only tease
Her as, head lowered, she walks her bike alone
Somewhere between her wanting to ride
And her certainty she will always fall.
Tomorrow, though I will run behind,
Arms out to catch her, she’ll tilt then balance wide
Of my reach, till distance makes her small,
Smaller, beyond the place I stop and know
That to teach her I had to follow
And when she learned I had to let her go.
This poem has been eating at me since I first encountered it about six months ago. The big emotional blow comes in the final two lines (Is that a couplet? I'm not really a poetry guy), where the narrator arrives at his conclusion about the need to let go. He’s preparing himself, as we all must, for that melancholic sucker punch that accompanies change. That one keeps me up at night.
But that’s not the hardest part of the poem — at least not anymore. It’s that first word in line 11. Tomorrow.
It’s written with the hope that his daughter will succeed. The entire poem is based on the premise that all of this will happen, that tomorrow can be counted on, which is a premise that lately has felt difficult to support. What assurance, after all, does he have? How can he be sure he’ll still be there for her? How can he be sure his daughter ...?
Boy, nobody should be thinking like this. A year of reading and writing stories about Katie Flynn, the 7-year-old Lido Beach girl who was killed by a drunk driver, colors all discussions about parenthood and faith and the future. Imagining what that little girl’s parents went through — are still going through — turns everything black.
A friend of mine says there is relief to be found in the example set by the Amish, who say they have already forgiven the gunman who murdered their little girls in last month’s school shooting. An Amish midwife who was present for the births of two of the slain girls told ABC News, “If you have Jesus in your heart and he has forgiven you ... [how] can you not forgive other people?”
My answer would be, because it’s never that simple. Pain fades at its own pace. The fear that the pain will never leave creates its own anguish, and it’s all very real. Still, it seems like the Amish, who on one hand might appear to be simply denying that agony, are on to something.
Their faith sounds rooted in the belief that the pain will fade even when it is still so fresh that it feels like it never will. If they truly have that level of faith, then I’m jealous.
But I’m heartened by the example of my wife, who lost both parents and her oldest brother within a few years of one another. Since then, she has become a mother. She has said that having a child, knowing how suddenly and horribly things can end, was a radical act of hope — the ultimate expression of the faith that life was still worth showing up for. And the rest of her family has expanded, too: She now has a dozen nieces and nephews, and her cousins are all having children.
In fact, we got a call last week about a new arrival, another cousin, another little girl, in Bellmore. Welcome to the family, Jacqueline Elizabeth, and try to remember that nobody is born knowing how to ride a bike.
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