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The way you look tonight

Three years ago, a summer was passing and grade school was starting across America. School lunchboxes were packed, books stacked and kids marched off to do the drudgery that we require of all our younger minds. While we dashed the young ones off to their lives, we went to work and went on about ours. We were concerned with power, electric power and would there be enough to run our air conditioning. We were concerned with computer jobs, would there be enough as many of our friends, who left the normal corporate world for the dotcom world were coming back like defeated British paratroopers at Arnhem, tired and beaten, but not defeated. We were concerned with our declining stock portfolios and what our friends would think of us for buying pets.com at 60.00 a share.

A new President was in Washington and Republicans were still basking in the fact that for the first time in memory, it was Republicans who had protested in the election, the shouts of "get out of Cheney's house" still ringing in their ears as they felt for the first time that they had not been victims of a Democrat political machine who controlled events because they controlled the mob. Now it seemed, the Republicans were also capable of street theatre and their own mob action.

In our modern age of the internet and the dissemination of image based information, we often forget about what a photograph means to us in a tactile sense. A photograph is a paper based chemical reaction to light that captures in two dimensions what the lens sees. A photograph is in a way a chemical memory of a time and space that has since passed and can never be recaptured. Light from the Sun on a particular orbit of the earth bounces off buildings and trees and is gathered by a small glass lens and concentrated onto a piece of paper coated with a silver compound that reacts to the light to capture the image. It is a miracle when you think about it.

The camera goes 'click', and another piece of time/space is captured. It is no wonder that many primitive societies consider photography to be the "stealing of a soul", in many ways that is what is going on. The soul of a moment in time is gathered and stored on a piece of paper.

Much more than just light is captured in a photograph, Our minds react to the picture and we are brought back to the time that the picture was generated. We are reminded of where we were and sometimes who we were when the picture was made. Photographs are often composed of scenes that are important to us at the time for seemingly trivial lighthearted reasons. Sometimes those pictures contain information which at the time they are made make no sense to us, but years later, Time and space have moved to provide a context that didn't exist when the picture was originally made.

Yesterday, a slice of time/space re-appeared into my life.

Its a summer vacation picture. it is of an older woman,My mother-in-law, wearing a Statue of Liberty foam-crown, so commonly found on the heads of tourists in the New York City area. She is standing on the front of a tourist boat in New York Harbor. She's smiling for the camera and all the folks at home in a grin that could easily contain a regulation football and leave space on each side of her face. She his happy, Her arms outstretched in front of the New York Skyline, Her right arm overhead of Ellis Island.

She's on vacation with her daughter. They have flown clear across country to visit New York City.

In the background, prominent in the scene, are "David" and "Nelson". "David" and "Nelson" are not relatives hogging the picture, "David" and "Nelson" are the names of the two WTC towers.

In every visit I ever made to Manhattan and the New York and New Jersey Area, "David" and "Nelson" stood there marking the daily passing of the Sun. If you were in Long Island traveling towards Manhattan you knew you were getting close when you could see the tops of the towers in lower Manhattan above the tree line. If you were in New Jersey, you could look across and see the brothers and know that the rotation of the earth ran through those axles that came up out of the ground in Manhattan, you could see it there, right across the water.

Three years ago, the world changed and I didn't even know it. It was mostly over by the time I became aware of it here on the West coast. Much like the way the lives of parents are destroyed without their knowing it in the hours before they find out that their children were killed overnight in a car accident, our lives were changed forever hours before I knew it had even occurred.

I turned on the TV the way I used to do every morning and I saw the axles of the earth crash to the ground. We wondered if we should send the kids to school, We wondered if the attacks would continue, if these attacks were just the start of something bigger. I found myself confronting a fear that I hadn't had in the years since the end of the cold war that 'today could be the last day of life on earth'. I watched in awe as aircraft around the country stopped flying. The sky was silent and for the first time in my life even in my fathers life, no aircraft were in the skies anywhere. As a pilot, being told there are no aircraft flying was the equivalent of a priest being told that there are no more churches.

Well, there was one aircraft. Out on the horizon that night you could see the navigation lights of an F-15 fighter aircraft in a wide orbit over the city, looking for an enemy that thankfully didn't reappear. I always wondered what was that pilots name and what was in his mind those nights. He was a man who like the rest of us worried for his family and hoped for the future, only he sat in the front of a weapon ready to do his duty, even though he was not in foreign skies against an enemy pilot, but here at home and his likely target would be a civilian airliner being used as a weapon against his family and his homeland.

The day went from bad to worse as the impact began to sink in as to what it all meant. " We are at war" is what I said when I saw that it wasn't a tragic airliner accident, the moment when the second tower was hit was as powerful to me as the words "The Japs Have Attacked Pearl Harbor" was to my fathers generation.

That night, I, like thousands of other Americans went to the Red Cross blood center to help in the smallest way I could with helping in dealing with the carnage. It was filled beyond capacity, parents brought their children for whom there were no babysitters planned for and they all calmly sat on the curb outside the building waiting their turn to help their fellow countrymen. For a large crowd, it was very quiet and orderly. It's amazing how emergencies turn what would ordinarily been a crowd of misbehaving kids and rattled parents into calm collected citizens, all more aware of their neighbors needs than their own desires. We all wanted to be somewhere else, we all wanted our pre-breakfast lives back.

That night I witnessed a bit of magic. The moment of magic was captured when a woman, who had clearly been a singer in her younger days began to sing " The way you look tonight". It wasn't obtrusive, it wasn't joy filled piano bar belting that was going on. This was something else.

She could see what I saw, the recognition of so many willing to give, and help at a time of need. I started the day wondering where my socks were and at the end of the day I had found my heart, thanks to a woman who's name I'll never know, and a moment in time that was not on anyone's agenda as much as 12 hours before. In the parking lot of the Red Cross stood a woman singing a song to an audience of Americans, doing all that they could with what little they had.

What was she wearing?
She was wearing a Statue-of-Liberty foam-crown.

I wasn't aware of the picture of my mother-in-law in front of the New York skyline in a Statue-of-Liberty foam-crown until yesterday. The slice in time/space from whence the picture was taken, a simple vacation trip taken before mass murder was committed in the same place as this photograph of a womans of joy and innocence, did not have the significance to me then that it now does.

Two seemingly unrelated events brought together by a simple piece of tourist kitsch.

Three years later, "David" and "Nelson" are gone, and so is my mother-in-law, of a disease she must have had but didnt know about at the time the picture was taken. She is happy, arms outstreched like Barbra Striesand in "Funny Girl" - she has 2 years to live, the buildings behind her and three thousand lives, only 14 months...

Somewhere in a drawer at the home of a woman who was once a singer, sits a small piece of tourist kitch, a green crown made of foam, to make the wearer look like the Statue of Liberty that she once bought on her trip to New York, unaware of how it and a photograph taken by the daughter of another woman visting New York before September 11th 2001 tied together time and space in the parking lot of the Red Cross on that warm summer night in September.

It's three years later and I still miss them. That song still goes through my mind everytime I think of how the world has changed.

Posted @ August 28, 2004 05:57 PM | History file

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