One More on Raleigh and 9/11

My son turned fifteen this morning at 1:03 EDT. He was at an overnight youth lock-in at Cherokee UMC when this moment passed. From what I hear, it didn't pass unnoticed. At that point--or at some other point during the night--a few of his friends held him down while everybody sang "Happy Birthday." Today he slept the whole event off, and in the evening Leesa and I took him out for steak. He opted for the steak burrito at Barberitos.

It's a happy day without doubt, but some sense of uneasiness haunts those back corners of my mind, those back corners where the future hides. Something--the motion of a hand reaching out of the shadows or a whistle--beckons us forward breath by breath through days that can be either tedious or pleasant in their sameness. Something else can leap from these same shadows and shout, "Surprise!" And then new paths open up through laughter and renewal. And something else again can leap out with sudden and stunning savagery and wrestle us to the ground (or further down).

Here's one more excerpt from my journal, written on Raleigh's tenth birthday:

23 September 2001 (Sunday)

Raleigh turned ten today. My baby boy is getting away from me. He wants to grow up, I know, but I just want to be able still to pick him up, to hold him close, to kiss his cheek more than just at bedtime. His physical growth is fairly slow at the moment, but his mind and spirit are growing faster. My feeling is that I'll not handle his teenage years well, and I don't want to feel what I will feel.

I can't shake the feeling that I'll send my baby boy to war before he has lived another ten years. I'm angry about that. It's not fair that in this age, which seems as if it should be grown beyond such pettiness and violence, we stare in the face more frightening and confusing means of warfare than ever before. Suddenly the good old days of two lines facing each other in an open field--a mode of battle I always thought stupid--would be a comfort. The enemy was clear; the weapons were visible and expected; the soldiers tended to make up a majority of the dead and wounded.

I think about a man on a flight with his daughter--a girl Raleigh's age--feeling helpless and wondering where the hijackers were taking them, wondering what their demands will be, wondering if he'll be paid for the time sitting in the plane at some dusty airport waiting for the hijackers' demands to be met . . . wondering why they are flying so low over New York City.

I think about a woman at her desk in the first tower struck. The keyboard clicks quietly beneath her fingertips as she answers email that came in since she left work the evening before. Trying to figure out the phrasing of a sentence, she looks up, looks out the window at the airliner less than 100 meters away, its nose pointed right at her. What a train wreck of mental questions, declarations, and screams. She blinks two or three times in disbelief or wonder, and each split-second focusing of her eyes only brings the airliner closer. She has that moment we've all had in dreams, that moment of breathless aching when we realize there is no escape, no place to hide, no time. Her mouth moves without sound, like in those dreams she, we--all of us have had. We wake up sweating, breathing hard. She dies, vaporized by the explosion.

Are these people I think about the lucky ones? They had their moments of terror and awful realization, moments I can barely imagine. But then all was over for them. How quick an end! Those of us who survive, however, grow sick at our stomachs from our imaginings, the sudden senations of fear they bring, from the distant throbbing terror that stalks the backwoods of our minds, from our waking up over and over again in the night with only the hint of the confused or fiery images projected on the backs of eyelids that can close for no longer than a blink over the next minutes or next hours.

I don't want my son to go to war. I'll never sleep, and I'll throw up all the time.

God help us all.