Date: Tue Sep 11, 2001 05:33:39 PM US/Eastern
Subject: News from NYC

Hi everybody. First things -- I, and as far as I can determine everybody that I know, is fine, none in the WTC at the time of the collapse, though there are of course friends and relations of friends and coworkers who live and work in the area or in the WTC, so there are a lot of shaken psyches and who knows what news the next 24 hours may bring.

One thing that I think may be encouraging to those of you who know people here, on NY local news there have been several interviews with people who were very high up in one tower or another at the time of the first impacts, and who reported that they and their entire floors were evacuated quickly and calmly well ahead of the eventual collapses. There are certainly thousands of injured and dead, but my impression of the local reports is that the vast majority of those on the floors below the plane impacts were safely evacuated. As they say, it is easy to imagine it being much much worse.

I don't know that I can say much else that you haven't gleaned from watching CNN yourselves. The city at large seems to be handling this with all of the best qualities that always seem to come forward in these sorts of crises, no panics, no hysteria, and thus far at least no indication of a rush to judgement or irrational anger. The news reports are still calling for emergency blood donors, but when I went to the hospital in my neighborhood they turned me and scores of others away until tomorrow, saying that they were already full up, except for O-.

The smoke and debris are billowing southeastward pretty much endlessly. Charred scraps of memos and documents and the like are to be seen floating down even in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. The trains and tunnels and bridges and so forth are mostly open heading out of Manhattan, but are shut down coming in. Phone service is sometimes interrupted as the lines are surely overcrowded. Many, many businesses, and I think most corporate offices, embassies, govt offices, and the like closed by mid-morning, and it seems likely that many of them will remain so at least through tomorrow. In my office we were obviously all either on the way in or just arrived when the first crash occurred, and we spent the rest of the morning huddled around our TVs. As the situation stabilized and the transportation reopened people contacted their loved ones and began to trickle home.

I guess that's all I've got to tell. There's a grey cloud in the sky where two towers used to stand.

Peace,
Jamie


Date: Wed Sep 12, 2001 09:43:53 PM US/Eastern
Subject: more News from NYC

Since I've had nothing else particularly to do today but watch the news (and go for a walk), just thought I'd send my impressions and summaries of what's new in NY today.

In many ways the outer boroughs of the city have resumed pretty much normal operations. Some major roads have been closed for brief periods to make a clear pathway for official vehicles and equipment. For example the highway in from Long Island was shut down during the morning, though outbound and surface traffic was unimpeded. I walked through several neighborhoods in Brooklyn this afternoon. The streets were in a strange sort of limbo between a beautiful idle September day and a serious, though not grim, quiet manner among all the pedestrians. The Promenade overlooking the East River and the Manhattan skyline was full of neighbors in shorts and camera bags, but a friendly murmur instead of a bustling din distinguished this from the usual tourist crowd.

Restaurants and grocers, art galleries and repair shops, all the usual street level businesses had their doors open and a reliable stream of customers, or at the least window shoppers, but the clientele were people who should have been otherwise engaged in their own business elsewhere. In the residential blocks, kids and parents, groups of teenagers, and all manner of neighbors were sitting on stoops or strolling through the playgrounds just filling time, and probably getting away from the relentless tv.

My roommate Everett, who works as a lawyer for the city schools, went to work in the municipal offices in Brooklyn, but left at 1 pm when it became evident that there just wasn't going to be much to accomplish today. The mail got delivered, and the trash got picked up, and the hospitals again said that they had received enough blood for the next couple of days' supply, but there are police officers standing guard on all the important street corners, and the long distance phone lines are still jammed, and there won't be any overnight packages, and the smoke is now trailing the wind to the north. I bought an apple, a bagel, and two sodas on my walk, and hoped that in some way my consumer confidence registered in the European stock markets.

In Manhattan and closer to the WTC, for those of you who have missed much of the newscasts, there are threats of further collapses of the rubble already on the ground and of the surrounding towers that were hit by the debris or have been weakened by the fires. The bridges and tunnels are still closed to civilian traffic. The subways and ferries are taking people under and around the lower tip of the island, but even in midtown or uptown there are few destinations to which there is any sense in reaching.

The stock market won't open before Friday. The longest close ever.

NATO has invoked Article 5, which declares that yesterday's attack on one member will be treated as an attack on all members. A first in the 52 years of the treaty.

Baseball has been cancelled for two straight days already, and will probably remain so until the planes are back online. Another first. Football the same.

From man-on-the-street interviews to expert commentators, newspaper editorials to the President himself, reactions are being urged on the basis of anger and revenge. And when the network newscasts discuss the possibility of vigilante attacks on Arab or Muslim Americans, in the interest of objective journalism they decide to resist saying that anyone who commits such an act is a terrorist themselves. Every time someone says "you're either with us or you're with them" the line between "them" and "us" begins to blur.

For whatever reason, aside from the continued good personal fortune of hearing that friend after friend has heard from their own safe and sound friends and relatives who were in NY on Tuesday, the most hopeful and certain feeling that we're all going to get through whatever comes to pass is the repeated statements by Mayor Guiliani and Governor Pataki that when the dust literally settles the World Trade Center will rise again. I took a couple of snapshots today to record this anachronistic skyline, because in a couple of years it will be easy to remember what happened, but hard to picture New York without the landmark buildings that will again dominate the gateway to the Hudson River from the top end of Battery Park, New York City.

Peace
James L. Parsons V


Date: Wed Sep 12, 2001 11:29:07 PM US/Eastern
Subject: more News from NYC

Yesterday and today I have avoided speaking or writing about the most important aspects of... well, all of everything. I'm going to try to do so for just a minute. I don't doubt that this will be less than an ideal statement, but here goes...

An inconceivable number of people are dead. Chances are that before this is over, there will be many many times more, most of them in distant lands with minds and hearts so different from mine that I could never imagine them. But those strangers that my country (and therefore I) will punish for their actions, and those strangers that my country (and I) will unfortunately punish for the actions of others, will be no more strange to me than the people who have died here. They will be no more strange to me than my countrymen whose vengeance will overpower their better angels. They will be no more strange to me than the true nature of friends, loved ones, and anyone who isn't me. And I will never know for certain what they think and feel or why, or if they are truly as strange and barbaric and inhuman as they can so easily seem.

In practical terms, in the necessary and true rational world that requires us to defend and to attack, we, and by definition I, will cause the deaths of human beings as surely as these terrorists have done so, and we will be absolutely right to say that our noble ends justify the means. And maybe those ends will come about, and someday far from now there will be no people who are strange to us, and these feelings that we experience now -- the hate and fear and sorrow and guilt and most of all the disconnection -- will be the foreigners, and that these horrors ever existed will be the only things we don't understand.

Peace
James L. Parsons V


Date: Fri Sep 14, 2001 02:07:19 AM US/Eastern
Subject: NYC Journal 9/13/01

At the bottom of this I have included yesterday's message with an addendum that I wrote later last night and did not send to everyone right off. I hope that you all don't mind getting these mass mailings. I am sending my thoughts out in this way for a number of reasons, including my own desire to have a single record of my thoughts at this time, and because I think that more or less the same message will be appropriate for all the family and friends receiving this. If you have any desire to forward any part of theses updates to anyone else, please feel free to do so, and I thank everyone who has let me know that they appreciate these letters. Perhaps they are as necessary for you to read as they are for me to write.

Today was an attempt to find a routine already. It is too early for it to be successful, but our stumbling steps today will make it possible for us to focus on things like conference calls and media schedules and report deadlines and the other trivia that we'll all have to return to soon enough. On the one hand, we say that the world, and especially America has changed irrevocably, and of course that seems inevitable. But it also hasn't changed at all, and the sense of profundity will seep away from the vast majority of us. Whatever lessons we think we're learning are going to be retained in times of contemplation, but the cycle of work and home and school and play and all the rest will return to normal, no quotation marks, no irony. And after all, when we say we must defend our lifestyle and our freedoms and the American way, that is what we are talking about, so it is that today New York, like the rest of the country, woke up this morning and put on its pants one leg at a time and went to work.

I woke up uncharacteristically ahead of my alarm clock, as I had on Wednesday. The rumble of buses and the rush of cars out my front window was indistinguishable from that of a week ago. My first motion was to the remote control for the radio, turning on the NPR news, and drawing the sheet up against the post-dawn chill. I was bone tired, as I am never a morning person, but after a few minutes of Morning Edition I ordered myself out of bed and into a wakeful shower.

Out the front door, my building super had set the courtyard garden sprinklers on and the run-off stained the steps. Parents walked their kids to the elementary school three blocks away; the backpacked gen-xers and the tie-clipped Greatest Generation all picked up their bagels and their Times and descended into the subway platforms. Nobody really talks to each other on the train anyway, and you can't look everybody in the eye and smile so you try to focus on your reading or your walkman or nothing at all, so the ride is exactly like every other, but of course it isn't. When we crest the elevated tracks just before and after the Brooklyn 9th St. station most everyone steals a glance out the window, tracking the progress of the smoke and dust we're heading into.

The train gets crowded. Depending on how closely your train is following the one ahead of it, it's possible to spend 40 minutes cheek to jowl with your fellow commuters. I assume the ridership is heavy because other transportation is still so limited, but I thought ahead of time that it should have been lighter, because below 14th St. there's still nowhere to go to work. The one giveaway that something is amiss is that when you come to a station and it's a matter of standing on tiptoes and holding your bag between your knees to let the latest additions on board, there's hardly a word spoken. Perhaps a mumbled "getting off" for the one transfer rider who has to worm out from the center of the car, but not a single demand to, "make room, we been waiting for two damn trains already," or "man, move into the middle so we can get on too, jeez," and not a single groan when the train stops several times in the middle of the tunnel for signal problems or traffic in the stations ahead, surely sending us minutes upon minutes behind schedule. It's hard to tell if anyone is nervous if the train pauses too long.

Surprisingly, the train doesn't skip it's lower Manhattan stops. Perhaps you are allowed to make transfers there, but just not come up to the street. I won't be coming out until midtown, so I still don't know the answer to that question. At 5th Ave. I gaze south, where 60 blocks away it is impossible to make out the details of the ruined complex. On Tuesday at this time I was watching the clearly visible smoking tops of the towers from this same vantage point for just a minute, deciding that I should hurry on into the office to find out what precisely was happening. There's no sense of urgency today, but there's also nothing to see from here, so I take my muffin and o.j. and continue on past the Fashion Week window displays in Sach's Fifth Ave.

My building's primary tennant is UBS Warburg, a large Swiss banking and financial firm. It is thirty-something stories of anonymous black-tinted glass next to the Waldorf Astoria hotel and in the general neighborhood of Grand Central and the U.N. Whenever the President is in town our block is usually on the edge of the police escorts and barricades. Today there is only one revolving front door open, with perhaps eight or ten building security guards posted inside and out to check company ID's, UBS to the right, everyone else to the left. The line is moving, but at 9:30 am it is still around the corner and a third of the way down the hill on 48th St. On my way to the back I pass a handful of my associates and we wave and say Hi, but there is no question that there will be no cutting. In line behind me the most animated conversation I've heard all morning is being conducted by a young banker describing his anticipated snafus trying to finalize a deal that was scheduled for Tuesday, the paperwork for which is in offices in the impenetrable zone downtown.

On the 8th floor, I reach my home away from home, the last cube on the inside wall of the east hall of our department. Tom, the dept director, is there and Brian, one of my immediate bosses, and Melanie the temp, but not Frances, my sprightly and efficient neighbor, or Kimberly, the one manager whose disdain for early rising matches and exceeds my own. Both Frances and Kimberly live downtown. It is 10am before they can walk, bus, and drag their way in. It's hard to decide which is eerier -- the car-less, dust-choked blocks they've left or the idea of mailing a review copy of the latest Stephen King out to a magazine that Monday said they were on a tight deadline.

I answer a few emails from work, some to friends, some for business. The business ones are all the same: "I hope you and everyone are all right, and we're thinking of you all. I hate to even bring this up, but if you know/have/can xyz, could you..." We could, probably. I forward some bills, and order some books from the warehouse. I tell the printer that we won't need envelopes for the invitations to Nancy Milford's book party, but did you get the revised layout? The travel office is focused on bringing authors stranded on tour back home or on to the next best thing, so I try to research Amtrak options for a book tour that's yet to start. There are a few phone messages from Monday asking for this or that which I sent out, but have no idea if anything got out before the mail planes got locked down. The phones are still only at 20%, so why bother calling to ask if that newspaper clipping went through on the fax machine.

The TV is off in Carol's office, the one that we'd spent all Tuesday huddled around. People check the news on websites, and small groups collect, leaning against the filing cabinets for a minute, to talk about the only thing that anybody can think to talk about, dispersing when a phone surprisingly chirps to life.

A few times in the morning some technician somewhere apparently is tripping the silent alarms, as the lobby fire station makes announcements to the effect that nothing is wrong, it's just a glitch while they're doing some maintenance. Around noon there's a buzz. The building next door, 277 Park, has, according to the intercom, "evacuated under its own discretion, based only on rumors. A fire detail has been dispatched there and there is nothing wrong." A few cell phone conversations have soon confirmed that nothing whatsoever is confirmable, but that friends at this or that company all around town have either evacuated or not some building or another and that maybe there was an actual scare or threat and maybe there was just gossip and rumor. Maybe the Port Authority and Grand Central are going to be off limits again, maybe it will be difficult or impossible to get home again today. A general meeting is called in the conference room. Clear heads tell everyone that this is the sort of thing that is probably just going to happen for the next few days, and there's obviously nothing to worry about. But nobody is going to say you can't or shouldn't be worried if that's what you are, and if you'd feel better someplace else, then you certainly should go where you need to be. It doesn't take five minutes for the simultaneous conversations to break out into, "well I heard..." and "what about..." Everybody knows that there's nothing to be on edge about, and there's everything to be on edge about. The conference room empties and the intercom blares once again, "The evacuation next door is based on just a rumor, it was not ordered or recommended, there is Nothing wrong." With that, half a dozen people decide enough is enough and are on their way out the door. Kimberly calls on her cell phone from the street: "There are so many people out here. Tell Tom I'm outta here, going home to my puppy. You are under no obligation to stay your own self. See ya."

I dawdle around the office for a few hours. I send my tax rebate to the United Way disaster relief and join the Sierra Club online. I don't feel like I've helped the world much. Eventually I realize that I'm just as stir crazy here as I would be at home. Tom and the other publicity managers still around decide that tomorrow would be just as useless as today, especially with the President and his security barricades coming, so everyone is dismissed until Monday. I was leaving anyway.

Midafternoon and I haven't eaten since that muffin. I stop at the Cafe Metro and order a bowl of pasta to go. I eat half of it on a bench across from the NBC studios news ticker. Bush has declared that "we will lead the world to victory in the first war of the 21st century." The gaping hole in my thoughts today has been filled. The inanity of applying any energy to myself or my job is replaced with a welcome horror at the atrocities already and those to come. It's comforting to fight the tears back and recognize that my guts know their priorities. I want the pain to go away, and I want it never to go away. I want to have this sense of purpose, but not be immobilized by its overwhelming pressure. A few pigeons find the tortellini I dropped unappetizing. A janitor sweeps it into a dustbin, and I thank him; he smiles back. I walk to Times Square.

There it's just like they say it is on TV. Busy, no doubt about it, but not busy for Times Square. Lines at the Broadway Tkts box office, but not long lines for Broadway. Blaring and garish and vibrant, but even the bouncer at the "gentleman's lounge" is on a ladder hanging American flags from the marquee. The stock tickers list the numbers and addresses for blood donation centers.

I wait for a bus down Broadway with two British ladies in their fifties, with their point and click cameras trying to decide if they should walk a few blocks more or rest here on the pedestal of a statue. I can't imagine what it would be like trying to decide to have a good time, not to waste that week of vacation and those plane tickets that took all year to save up for, that you always said you'd take before you got too old to really enjoy the nightlife, before you got too tired to hoof it around town for 14 hours on your feet, and you always said that you and your best friend were going to treat each other to it, I'll by your ticket, you buy mine, and it'll be our one last fling, like we did that summer before we went to university,when you met that awful Greek fellow who wouldn't leave you alone, but I finally kissed him on the ferry, remember that, and I'm not going to kiss any Greeks in New York I can tell you, I want a cowboy or a surfer this time. The bus comes at last and takes us south, past Herald Square, the Flatiron building, and truncating its route at Union Square, the end of the line if you don't have some proof of residence below 14th St. to get you past the barricades on foot.

Here the routine is abandoned. The normalcy is put out of mind. The National Guard humvees and the dust masks, mostly on the women and kids, and the dust, everywhere the lightest haze and scent of the burning dust. I didn't consciously think of it until just this moment, but I knew there was something down here. I'd read online that Union Square was the site of a makeshift memorial and a vigil. Across the street, among the abandoned street construction at the edge of the park is a woman with a bagpipe, talking to some man. The crowd behind them is huge and silent, but rippling. On the steps and plaza before the statue of Grant (I think) on his horse, have been taped yards and yards of sketch paper and newsprint in concentric arcs. Markers, pens, crayons, and pencils are scattered everywhere. Hundreds, probably thousands, of people have left messages there, in dozens of languages, in children's scrawls, in graffiti art, in pastel murals, in calligraphy, and mostly in firm print. In the center is a white papier mache tower surrounded by flowers and cards. It seems like half of the city is here taking pictures and video of the other half crawling on hands and knees to express something, anything, everything that will relieve what is wrong inside them.

The blonde bagpipe lady with her New Balance sneaks and her Gap shorts plays and marches a regimental guard's paces back and forth at her post. Some man who seems organizational is thanking some part of the crowd for their help, and passing on the compliments of some official or another who has apparently seen the Square. Something about cars and the west side. A young girl with angel wings woven out of something like what you make a woven seat from is asked by a reporter-sounding woman to talk about what's going on here. It turns out the angel-girl is 20, and she and the organizational guy were etc etc. It occurs to me to look around the crowd, and I am easily in the oldest half of the population here. I wonder if anyone in America over the age of 30 would think it worthwhile to put on angel wings and bring crayons to the park.

There are so many people taking pictures of the messages we're walking around. I try to read them all, to see if there is any one that I could take home with me that would sum up what is said here, but there are too many to be represented by a part. Many flags, many prayers, sometimes accompanied by a picture of a loved one who hasn't called home yet. Many declarations of defiance, of strength, of unity, of support from visitors and foreigners, many symbols, many drawings of two square towers alone against a soft white cloud or a tear. Many Gods blessing America. Many many thanks to the firemen and cops and emt's. And of course there are the screams. The raging demands for justice, vengeance, retribution, punishment, a place to direct and unleash that quiet anger. But more than all the rest combined, never conquering the dialogue, but the strongest, clearest, most persistent voice in the room calls for peace. Salaam. I try twice to add my assent to that voice, but both times I stand up disappointed in my attempts to express myself. I think that the word I need to add, and can't bring myself to write, is forgiveness. I notice it doesn't exist, even among the peace and love in this square. I try to imagine a way in which all the governments and all the people of them that ally to hunt down the perpetrators and the supporters of this destruction find their quarry. And taking them in the sights of the firing squads, drop their rifles and forgive them. And that somehow in that moment, we all have the most enlightened sense of empathy, and we realize that we are all each other, and it is no longer a question of doing unto others as you would have done, because there are no others. But I think of Nazis, and of slave traders, and of genocides, and of these madmen, and I can not see myself in them, and I can't bring myself to empathize, and I justify it by saying that these people have never once and never will empathize with me, and I know that that's just an excuse for my own weakness, my own inability to love enough to overcome their hate. So I say my insufficient peace, and I take the last train home.

On that train, it is again a packed house. Pressed against the door frame is a young black man with a canary yellow shirt that reads "Black Angel" around an image of an ornate cross. He is taller than me, and from his headphones seeps a running rhythm. I'm the last one at the door, aiming for a sliver of space at this kid's back. Over his shoulder he sees me coming, and he isn't happy. "Don't you dare get on my back," he says. He's loud, even for a regular New Yorker, but today he is deafening. He is talking to me, but I get the impression that the whole train is his audience. I can feel the eyes of the other passengers waiting to see what I will do as well. "Don't you even dare," he repeats, in endless variations. I step in, straightening my back to keep my ass out of the closing door. He jackhammers me with demands to stay away from him. I haven't brushed up against him yet, there's barely more space inside then there appeared to be and I can lean against the door for bracing. I can't imagine what to say, so I look him briefly in the eye, and then avert my gaze to somewhere over his left shoulder. He has taken off his headphones and shifted himself around to partially face me. "I don't want no damn parrot on my shoulder, goddammit," he says. "Yeah I'm talking to you. Damn." The rant continues.

A tiny Caribbean woman who got in just ahead of me is on my immediate right side. She says to the young man to be careful, he doesn't want to end up in trouble, he doesn't want to end up in jail, Jesus loves him, and he doesn't want to mess with the Devil. I turn my head to her for a moment, and realize that this has nothing to do with me. That neither his anger nor her concern are related to me at all, and that I have no fear or resentment toward him, and only a practical appreciation for the uniquely appropriate nature of her intervention. His tirade loses focus as she redirects his attention. He tells her not to worry about him, that he can take care of himself, that he is strong, and that he can handle whatever comes his way. Both of them are repeating the same phrases over each other incessantly for miles and miles. No prison walls can hold him. He just needs respect, he says; he can accept anybody who treats him with respect. It occurs to me that he neither knows the meaning of the word, nor understands how his actions affect how he is received. Then it occurs to me that perhaps I am the one who doesn't know anything. That perhaps in the real world respect is earned by intimidation and attack. Perhaps in the real world, if Jesus loves you you don't need to love anyone on earth. I don't speak for the entirety of the ride. I stand where I am, and let it all wash over me. It doesn't have anything to do with me. I am the outsider or they are; empathy is impossible. I am going home to see what answers the TV news has.

good night, and peace,
Jamie


Date: Fri Sep 14, 2001 09:09:44 PM US/Eastern
Subject: NYC Journal 8/14/01

For me, nothing happened today. I stayed home all day, watched or listened to a lot of news, read a bit, reheated some leftovers. I had the impulse to connect with people somewhere, but didn't know exactly what to do. The reports on tv list where donations of work and blood and supplies can be made, but they also say that all of those things are in overabundance for the time being. The mayor even said that at the WTC they wouldn't be using any more volunteers, just the professionals, as it was getting to be too chaotic to organize everybody. I think perhaps that it will be more important to be available and to give support in the weeks and months to come, when the rush of emotion has ebbed and people's lives have had to resume, but the needs for blood or manpower or material might be just as great as it is in this immediate aftermath.

Anyway, so I haven't anything newsworthy to report. I'm conscious of these letters perhaps being an exercise in navel gazing. I definitely have as healthy a narcissistic streak as anyone, but I also just don't think I have anything to say that hasn't been said infinitely better by people who have been places and seen things and been involved in this week in ways that I haven't approached, so I'm sticking to where I've been and what I know, which is naturally a little self-centered.

I also want to correct myself, or one thing that I'm not sure if I've said. I've been very fretful this week of the ways in which this tragedy seems so sure to lead to many more, and not just the threat of further terrorism, but the threat of the wrath of our country and our allies. This may seem like a moral equivalency which would be pretty abhorrent. There is the evil of these terrorists and those like them around the world. And there is the evil of whatever their terrors force us to do to defend ourselves and everything that we know is so worth any price to protect. The evil of the murderer is not equivalent to the evil of the executioner. I am a firm believer that whatever our extensive flaws, this honestly is the greatest country and people in the history of the world. I just wish we had the capacity in ourselves and in the world around us to be even better than that. To return war with peace. It can't be done, and our failure to does not diminish what we have accomplished. And I guess if we can conceive of peace, then it must be within us to attain it. We might not get there ourselves, but it can happen, and maybe we're pushing toward it bit by bit.

Try this. People can change. America renounced slavery and the genocide of manifest destiny. Those things will never happen again by any people that could be considered Americans. I doubt very much that Germany or Japan or any of the democratic republics of the world could ever behave as they have at times before they came to follow our lead. Russia and many other totalitarian regimes are slowly finding their way to the light. The influence of freedom is greater and deeper than it has ever been, and often that has followed the forceful destruction of the enemies of that freedom. So perhaps it isn't too much to hope that we can beat the terror out of some of these countries and people that feel it. Maybe our anger will lead to a better world. Ugly as that is to face, it's not so ugly as the anger that has come against us.

Well, that's enough of that. See what happens when you stay inside all day. Tomorrow -- Out of the House.

Peace,
--james


Date: Sun Sep 16, 2001 01:38:45 AM US/Eastern
Subject: NYC Journal 9/15/01

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, and I guess I'm glad it was sooner. We'll ignore the guilt, which is just self-serving anyway. Today was a pretty good day, and I was able to tear myself away from the damned TV images for most of it. I'm not sure which of those caused the other, but I think we can say that the 12 stages of whatever are progressing along. And I think that's not an unreasonable generalization for a great number of the people on the periphery of the events this week.

I now have confirmation of two people, and their companions, who took the mental and emotional refuge of snagging some tickets to The Producers. I saw people sunning themselves on the boardwalk at Coney Island. My roommate and I took a walking tour of Southeast Brooklyn and ate foods with funny names, and actually found it amusing to do so. I've heard of people who worked on Friday, or went in today to get a head start on the backlog. I've had conversations today about new topics. They were short, but I had them.

And the phones, the blessed phones, seem to be coming back. I got the first phone messages I'd had all week, and actually was able to speak to my parents (Hi, Mom; Hi, Dad!) for the first time since telling them I was still here to be spoken to on Tuesday.

On the B68 bus from Windsor Terrace to Brighton Beach you travel down Coney Island Avenue, which Everett and I did this afternoon. At one time or another in the history of this street, as I understand it, any given section of that route was a heavily Jewish neighborhood, and there is still a huge population there, in the neighborhoods of Flatbush, Midwood, Kings Highway, Brighton Beach, etc. But nowadays it's hard to make such a generalization about most of it. Hard against a synagogue is a Pakistani restaurant, which abuts a Caribbean bodega, which is followed by some shop with a sign exclusively in Arabic which is across the street from The Fuel Oil Store, which is a block away from the Brooklyn Pigeon Fanciers Association, and so on in the New York of myth and fable passing left to right out the windows. And the banners put up by the Brooklyn Arab-American Society between the telephone poles echo the solidarity of the Sabbath prayers surely being said by the proprietors of the Yarmulke Shop. And the two dark-skinned veiled women and the man with the black fedora and the curling sideburns (what do you call those, again?) cross the street past each other, and it seems so simple.

Eventually, we alight in Brighton Beach, Little Odessa -- Chinatown or Little Italy could be more famous but no more a perfect example of the other side of the world plucked out and placed whole and intact in its own niche of New York City. In the fresh vegetable markets crumpled old women haggle over sacks of fruit and tubers. Tall, dirty blondes in acid-washed denim stroll through tables of videos featuring wool-capped heroes and epic looking cyrillic titles while atrocious glasnost-inspired electronica blares over tinny speakers. Mrs. Sasha's Knishes come in as many varieties as Dunkin Donuts, and every novelty and nick-knack shop sports a magic-markered sign that declares, "Sorry, out of Flags." It seems that there would have been enough for everybody, but the people who got there first bought them by the gross, strung them around their necks, belts, antenna, doors, railings, car windows, shopping bags.

We walk easterly along the ocean, through Manhattan Beach's up-scale parks, curl inland across Sheepshead Bay, back under the elevated tracks to the bus stop, and home again. Check email, listen to those glorious phone messages, and watch the Osama Bin Laden story on PBS Frontline, but then it's time to eat again, and turn the TV over to cable for The Lion in Winter, featuring Hepburn, O'Toole, a boyish Anthony Hopkins, and oi! isn't that future James Bond, Timothy Dalton?

I was listening to some jangly pop-rock on WLIR, 92.7 FM, and appreciating the adaptability of the lyrics to any tragic mood, when the station ID came on. One of those cleverly produced, heart wrenching sound collages of voices and news clips and patriotically swelling music, and the voice-over wishing the listeners peace, love, safety, and the blessings of the Almighty on heroes, victims, and country... "and His damnation on those responsible for this terrible horror."

Still, it really was a mostly good day.

Peace
James L. Parsons V


Date: Mon Sep 17, 2001 12:35:04 AM US/Eastern
Subject: NYC Journal 9/16/01

I think this will be the end of these daily mass updates. As a personal necessity, I've exorcised whatever shocks there were. Of course we will all carry this week with us as long as we live, and we will be holding each new development as the central fixture of life for quite some time. However, I am not the center of this. I am just one of 250 million Americans, 6 billion humans, and I don't have anything more to say for anyone but myself. I want to thank all of you for being at the other end of the line, and for writing back when you could with the comfort of letting me know you're there.

It's back to work, and none too soon, tomorrow. Today, a glorious gift of late summer sun, gentle breath of wind, and I raced the 8 year old kid from across the hall down the stairs as I went out to the park for some frisbee and an Uncle Louie G's Italian Ice afterwards. I won the race (huzzah!) -- the kid's legs are really short, and he fell down once (not hurt at all, I swear), so I didn't gloat too much. Roommate 2, Trent, was home last night and this morning. I don't know if it's because he's the first new person I'd seen in five days or if it was just time, but there were the first jokes and unfettered laughter in the apartment in what seemed like a lifetime, but of course it was just the lifetime since Tuesday. Prospect Park must have had the population of a small city in it today. It feels a little awkward to admit (more self-centered guilt which is really only there to make me feel better about not feeling worse), but I think everyone who could choose to really needed to not be sad today. Kites, soccer, baseball, frisbee, sunbathing, sexy, yuppie bohemians playing guitar under an oak tree hoping the other sexy, yuppie bohemians will ask them out for a latte or, even better, offer a recording contract, and all the rest of the usual suspects were there, and every exhale set loose the tension to be caught in the slipstream and carried away, anywhere but where it wasn't needed for an afternoon.

Pataki said that he'd be putting forward a couple of bills in a special session of the state legislature tomorrow. Bomb threats, real or fake, will be a felony (good), and the city and state police will have unspecified expanded arrest, wiretap and search and seizure powers to chase down suspects with terrorist links (holy crap). I heard a tidbit on NPR that said that romantic comedies are flying off the shelves at Blockbuster, and high powered action flicks are going nowhere, except for "The Siege," the "terrorists bomb NY" movie where Denzel Washington has to catch the bad guys, but the real enemy is the martial state imposed by General Bruce Willis.

I got a Snapple from a little grocery where it turned out the TV was tuned to an Arabic sounding show, but it might have been Swahili for as much as I know about the world, and the guy behind the counter might have been a Buddhist or a Druid, from London or Sri Lanka or Pakistan or Denver. I wanted to give him a hug and tell him that I was just a dumb suburban American, but that on behalf of the willfully ignorant everywhere would he tell all the other potentially Arab/Muslim people that we loved em, no matter how horrible we might seem. I mean after all, they all know each other, right? I paid my buck-fifty, smiled like a dork, and went on out.

Nobody knows what to do right now. And Bush and Powell and Bin Laden and Hussein and everyone else that seems to have the fate of the rest of us in their hands are in the same uncharted territory as the rest of us. That doesn't sound very encouraging on the face of it, but if we're in uncharted territory then anything can happen. Here there be dragons, and here there be doves.

Peace
James L. Parsons V