Apparently I'm riveted by loud noises and shiny objects. While i was in D.C., I could not help but look at virtually every airplane (there were scores of them) that took that sharp southward turn over the Tidal Basin while descending to Ronald Reagan Airport. Also on that day lots of military helicopters were patrolling up and down the Potomac and over the Tidal Basin, practically skirting the water. Then at one point we saw what I thought was Marine One. Another time I saw a Chinook flying close overhead. Cool. Shiny AND loud.
The photos I took of the helicopters were blurry. I took several photos of jets as well, as you can see above. In a few of them, the jet looked as though it was going crash into a building or monument. In the pre-9/11 world I would have published it because I would have thought it an interesting visual trick of perception. But nowadays, it just made me feel queasy. I deleted them.
Posts
.jpg)
6 comments:
i know what you mean. not about shiny and loud, rain man, but the post 9/11 queasiness. on our recent d.c. foray i also noticed the large number of planes flying all around us and couldn't help but think of that day. while touring the pentagon, there was a sobering display that drove home what a perfectly ordinary day it was just before we experienced such a rent. it was a schematic showing the path of the plane into the building. every desk and conference room chair was labeled with a person's name, each one color coded to show who was killed, injured, uninjured, out for the day, or simply away from their desk.
i'm curious, while there, did you talk to your kids about 9/11? I remember at the time that it happened, telling my oldest that some men did a bad thing that was making everyone sad, as she was aware of all the news watching and talk going on. while looking at the displays, though, she didn't remember any of it.
I remember seeing lots of jets while visiting the monuments. It is an odd sound to hear when you are staring up at a huge monument and contemplating the man (or men or women) that inspired it and then you see and hear a NW jet zoom by.
awww...i like rain man. what a charming idiot savant. i really am very much like him apart from the savant part.
---
more seriously, thank you for your thoughtful post. your d.c. story was a cold splash of water for sure. in a related note, i've often been struck by the odd ordinariness we encounter sometimes in the midst of something very sad. i remember going to a funeral in austin, texas of a teenager who had accidentally killed himself doing something terribly foolish. at the cemetery the birds were chirping, the cars on the nearby highway were speeding blithely along, the sky was pretty, and the warm air was welcome on a late winter day. i felt guilty that things were as normal as they were.
life just sort of goes on.
--
we briefly mentioned 9/11 to the kids, and i was VERY surprised that none of them seemed to know anything about it. i assumed they would have known something from their school mates even if they had not picked up anything hearing my wife and i talking about it.
we had to reassure our so sensitive and anxious middle child that it happened before she was born.
--
have you gone to the holocaust museum? on our trip in the car i started to talk in general terms about the holocaust when the kids overheard me talking about the museum to my wife. she cut me off several times, however. we had a little disagreement about that.
Okay, let me set the record straight...or at least set it accurately. I did not "cut him off". I was trying to tone him down (what else is new?). As we were driving to the Metro station, professormikey is saying "Kids. Look around. Everyone on this highway? Dead! Everyone on the Metro? Dead! You are riding to DC with corpses!" (Okay, that last sentence I made up...but doesn't that sound like him?) I thought that the 10 year old could handle more detail on death and genocide than the 5 year old. So sue me!
it would have been scary had i been talking about zombies.
but i wasn't.
corpses on the metro may be morbid, but zombies on the metro--well, that's almost as scary as real life.
i could ramble for a while on this topic, but in short, we have not been to the holocaust museum. we felt like one kid was perhaps old enough to see it but the other wasn't. i certainly believe in educating our kids about life, however ugly, in order that they learn from it, whatever that lesson may be. having said that, i see kids getting those lessons in two ways. the first is when the world foists its ugliness upon them whether we like it or not; they experience rascism, they live through and remember 9/11, a friend dies. The flip side of that is when we have the gift of deciding when to open their eyes to the world's ugliness. example... my other1/2 and i had a similar over-the-heads-of-the-kids type of disagreement when i was trying to instill a healthy sense of caution in my oldest as she was leaving for the amusement park. a man was just decapitated by a roller coaster for walking under one to retrieve his hat. i simply told her that he was struck and killed. other1/2 decided to throw in the part about his head coming off. myself, i thought that was an image that they could be spared, esp. the younger one. i guess it's something along the lines of letting them be kids as long as possible.
i just pulled the throw rug back and called down through the floor vent (we're at my parents' 100 year old house - it's how the heat from the fireplace was used to heat the bedroom above.) to my oldest and asked if she had studied the holocaust in school yet. no. does she know about it? no, she says. like you, i'm surprised by both that and her lack of knowledge (before our d.c. trip) about 9/11. hart to imagine not having that as part of your baseline knowledge, isn't it? Even at her age, i would assume some type of familiarity. so do you leave those alone, and let them learn as part of their middle school history class, or bring it up?
--
tragedy, or simply pain, is always in that sea of ordinary. i've often thought about the fact that (call me weird) moments of pain, sadness, or ugliness are happening constantly, but we go merrily along with no idea, if we're not involved. i'm not explaining it well. at any moment, someone could be sweating in a dentist's chair, a kid scraping their knees, a car crashing, a heart breaking, and the rest of us have no physical or emotional awareness of it. it seems like there should be some sympathetic stab in our own shoulder, like that twin thing, or a rush of awareness that tragedy or pain is near us. A jumping up out of our chair when our child has been hurt at school. But there's not. So yes, the blue sky, the cars going by. it keeps going and it's amazing.
Post a Comment