December 7, November 22, September 11, January 6

 

 

The 1976 Bicentennial three years after the Twin Towers were built

These are my generation’s days of infamy. They were all shocking events, ones that left an indelible mark on history. In terms of immediate loss of life, September 11 and December 7 stand apart, although all were national traumas.

 

These dates are so burnished in our minds that we can remember exactly where we were when they occurred.

 

And now, astonishingly to me, it has been 25 years since the horror of September 11.

 

I have written before about that morning in these pages and this is something I wrote years ago:

On Sept. 11, 2001 Ann and I were on our boat in Norwalk, Ct., a clear somewhat breezy day with a deep blue sky. We had the TV on and, in complete disbelief, the tragedy unfolded before our eyes.

 

Although we were fifty miles away, we could see the smoke drifting south from the Twin Towers. To this day I still feel that sense of incredulity. Did this really happen here? My son, Jonathan, had been interviewed only a couple of weeks before by Cantor Fitzgerald, and offered a job to work on the 102nd floor of One WTC. They lost 658 employees on that fateful day. Jonathan decided to take another job. Is it merely coincidence and accident that governs life’s outcomes? Or is it simply Shakespeare’s more cynical line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

 

My older son is the poet of our family and this is what he wrote on that very day. One line in particular resonates: “If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life, it could not compete with what witnessed, I.”

 

Twenty-five years later, I can still summon that morning almost physically.

 

In later years I was reading a short story by John Updike and it was with some trepidation that I realized his story, “Varieties of Religious Experience,” is about that very day. Until then I had assiduously avoided 9/11 literature, as the pain of remembrance was too great. But I relented.

 

It begins with “THERE IS NO GOD: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall.” The protagonist was from out of town, visiting his daughter and grandchild at their apartment in Brooklyn Heights. To get through the story, written from various perspectives, including a woman on ill-fated United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, I had to continually take deep, slow breaths just to control my anxiety.

 

Not that Updike capitalized on gruesome details. It was the constant, unreal undercurrent of the lunacy of that day. One knows where it is all going. And if this is what God is all about, anyone’s God, religion seems to become a source for justifying anything.

 

One brief paragraph from the story encapsulates its essence:

 

Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything. Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism.

 

So, other than to somberly mark this date, I have struggled with whether to say anything about the moment in which we are living. I am reluctant to turn September 11 into another occasion for a political argument. But I cannot pretend that what is happening in this country does not affect how I experience this anniversary.

 

Passing the Brooklyn Bridge and the Twin Towers on our boat, 1994

And this is where I become angry.

 

We are living through what feels to me like a slow-motion national trauma. Not another September 11, obviously. Nothing could be another September 11. But the same awful sensation of watching something happen that you cannot stop, of knowing that something fundamental is being lost while those with the power to prevent it seem unwilling or unable to do so. Where are our justices, judges, representatives, senators, and cabinet members who have sworn allegiance to our Constitution?

 

The presidency was never intended to be a vehicle for one man's perpetual self-dramatization, enrichment, grievance, and pursuit of personal power.

 

Yet that is increasingly how it feels.  One by one, traditions, institutions, relationships with our allies, assumptions about presidential behavior and even elements of our national culture are being pulled apart. The White House itself has become a stage for the president's carefully constructed image of omnipotence. American culture becomes spectacle. Foreign policy becomes personal theater. Even the possibility of war can be addressed with the casualness of playing a video game.

 

And while all of this is going on, the president and those around him continue to test how much power can be accumulated in the executive branch and how much the other institutions of government will tolerate. That frightens me. What frightens me even more is how quickly the extraordinary can become ordinary.

 

A president says something that would once have produced days of national outrage, and we move on to the next statement. An institution is challenged, a norm is violated, a traditional restraint disappears, and we shrug because there is another outrage waiting tomorrow.

 

Perhaps this is what a slow-motion national trauma looks like: not one building collapsing before our eyes, but the gradual realization that traditions we assumed were permanent may not be.

 

I have lived through wars, assassinations, Watergate, political upheavals and other periods when the country seemed to be coming apart. I have always believed that, however ugly American politics could become, the underlying institutions were stronger than the people temporarily occupying them.

 

I am no longer sure. I cannot look at what is happening and simply reassure myself that American democracy is too strong to fail. Democracies survive because people defend them.

 

This brings me, uncomfortably, back to UA Flight 93. Those passengers eventually understood that they were not going to be rescued by someone else. They had to act themselves. This is not a call to violence; but citizenship sometimes requires people to stop being passengers.

 

Our equivalent is not storming a cockpit. It is voting. It is speaking. It is paying attention. It is refusing to accept lies simply because they are repeated often enough, or the increasingly fantastical AI-generated images and videos of a president who seems determined to turn himself into a character in his own mythology. It is supporting institutions when they are under pressure. It is insisting that the Constitution applies to everyone, including the person sitting in the Oval Office, no matter how festooned that office may be in gold.

 

But I can put into words what I see and what I feel. That is the only power I have, in addition to voting.

 

Twenty-five years ago, Ann and I were on our boat in Norwalk CT, where we lived each summer, and watched those towers disappear from the television screen while the smoke could be seen from our boat’s bridge across the western Long Island Sound some fifty miles away. I remember the disbelief and fear and wondering what had happened to the country I thought I knew.

 

I now find myself asking a different question: What are we willing to do to make sure we do not lose it? I don't know the answer.

 

But I know I don't want to be silent.

Capturing the void: The New Yorker, 2001

 

The Wedding Prequel: A Mini-Vacation, With Complications

 

 

Our trip earlier this month was for the big event, our son’s marriage, and that is now safely encapsulated in the prior entry.  We prefaced that happy occasion by attempting to take a “mini” vacation.

 

One of my regrets when we were boating is that we never took our boat through the Cape Cod Canal and visited the ports along the Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine coasts. We did push to more eastern points, Cuttyhunk, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, with the latter being the furthest of our trips. Those were mostly pre-Internet days, and my communication with my office was by phone. Had I had the opportunity to work remotely as we do today, no telling how far we might have gone.

Nantucket Morning 1986

 

Looking back at my former self, I wonder where I found the energy (and fearlessness) to do as much as we did. But, by the time I was able to cobble together as many as three weeks, we were looking to “settle down” in one port for as much as a week or more, and Block Island always seemed to serve that purpose.

 

So, fast forward to the problem of squeezing in some time on the Massachusetts coast around the time of the wedding: we are a couple of 40-year-old minds trapped in 80-year-old bodies. We failed to realistically take into account the vicissitudes of travel nowadays. As a planner (hey, if I didn’t carefully chart our boat trips before the days of GPS, we might have missed Nantucket altogether and wound up in Ireland!), I naturally looked for the best possible flight options, and from there, car rental and hotel stays.

 

What is the saying, man makes plans and God laughs? He/she/they had a good one on us.

 

We booked Delta as it had an ideal nonstop flight, leaving for Boston first thing in the morning, thus almost guaranteeing an on-time arrival since the plane would already be at our local PBI at departure time (PBI was its designation then; now it is the unspeakable DJT). There was also a return flight the following week in early afternoon, well after the morning rush hour to Boston. So we booked those flights, Thursday to the following Thursday, and arranged our trip to arrive in time for the wedding and do our mini vacation afterwards.

 

So everything sensible, yes?

 

No.

 

Delta changed the flight out of here to the early afternoon, meaning arriving in Boston at rush hour, if it was on time. And we would have to return the car for the only nonstop return flight, leaving Boston in the morning during rush hour. No way did we want to deal with either scenario on a weekday, so I was able to successfully reorient our trip, this time arriving Sunday and departing the following Sunday. This meant having our little holiday first, and then the wedding. OK, we can deal with it that way. And thus the plans were set.

 

But it still meant packing for a week, about 20 pounds of stuff for me and 50 for Ann (why does it always seem to work out 2:5, no matter how long the trip or the destination?). And the carry-ons, our essential medications and nowadays our chargers and other related electronics. In this case, we’re pretty even, so another 10 pounds each. All of this “stuff” would have to be lifted onto a bus which apparently was the only way to get from the Boston airport to their off-site rental car center.

 

So I protested.  Her reply was simple. We’ll ask the bus driver to help us.  Realizing Ann lives in the alternative universe of the civilized past, when we all got “dressed up” to get on a plane, when there would be people there to help you check in, and the digital kiosk did not exist, I nodded obediently.

 

While I sprung for the amusingly named “Comfort Class,” a joke airlines have designated to extract as much money as possible from those desiring those old civilized days, my frugality as a Costco member led to a car rental reservation through them. Their rental agency du jour when I booked was Budget Rental.

 

Doesn’t make much difference to me, I thought. We’re no longer “elite” since I no longer travel for work when once upon I time I had a Hertz fast track account. They want to make sure that when you really need the “advantages,” that’s when you should be denied them.

 

For a hotel, we chose the Salem Waterfront Hotel, centrally located for where we wanted to visit, eliminating the need to check in and out of different hotels. And, because of boating, I’m a sucker for waterfront. Naturally, the hotel is not on the waterfront. I should have known, as the price was less than a bazillion bucks a night. But it was a good choice, rooms with spacious accommodations and very well located, only a block from Salem Harbor.

 

So, believe it or not, no complaints there. But I digress to the departure from PBI.

 

Not surprisingly, the flight was late, but only by an hour, which nowadays is a minor miracle. Naturally, every seat was filled, and I was left to get our small carry-ons up into the overhead bins, competing with people already seated who had chosen to put large luggage in the overheads which I would have checked, or would have considered just driving it all in a U-Haul, forgetting about flying.

 

But the real fun was at the Boston airport, finally retrieving our luggage, two medium-sized suitcases, 32 and 38 pounds respectively (remember, though, the 2:5 ratio of their contents).

 

We finally found the “line,” really a crush of people following the laws of Social Darwinism, trying to get on the “bus” to the off-site rent-a-car center. This vehicle was really three or four buses connected by flexible rubber so it looked like a long snake. My hat is off to the driver of such a contraption, but even if we were lucky enough to be able to board at the front, no way he or she (or maybe it was a humanoid) would have looked at us and taken pity on our struggle with four suitcases, having to not only lift them up two steep steps but then onto a higher rack.

 

For the first time since my open-heart surgery fifteen years ago, I thought I could feel the heavy-duty steel wires holding my breastbone together cry out for restraint. I think someone actually volunteered to help with the heaviest one, and to that chivalrous stranger, my thanks.

 

If only the agony ended there: on to the car rental.

 

We were herded from the snake bus into a corral where other cattle like us were standing in a zigzag line of untold numbers to get to the Budget/Avis rental counters. Apparently, those companies had merged to benefit the shareholders.

 

People ahead of us said someone who had just got his car remarked it was a two-and-a-half-hour wait. Maybe, I thought, these people too were clever Costco members. What a deal! Perhaps many of these people prepaid their rentals for an even better deal! I didn’t go for that option, I guess, for situations just like this.

 

Out of the corner of my eye, way down the airline-hangar-sized building, I saw nearly empty Alamo counter, an attendant on duty. I watched the luggage on line and asked Ann to go down there and check if they could rent us a car for a week.

 

They had two unreserved cars left, including the same stripped-down Toyota I had reserved at Budget. So we left our line and got a car. I wish that was the end of this part of the story.

 

I had already set the route from a myriad of Google Map choices, trying to avoid dark coastal roads and the one it preferred, into Boston via major toll roads and then out of Boston using the same. I was not going to drive into Boston merely to go northeast to Salem.

 

This car was perfectly fine, but basic. I had to get used to inserting the ignition key into the steering post, like in the old days. The shift was no longer on the steering post but on the floor and I kept turning on the wipers when shifting. The luggage compartment could not be opened except from an inside latch right next to the gas latch and, at night, not illuminated, although there was an option on the key, that is if you can see it in the dark and don’t turn on the alarm by mistake.

 

But the main problem getting to the hotel was that Google Maps did not want to do what it was told. It had us going through backstreets, strange neighborhoods, even what I thought were a few dirt roads. I was looking for 1A North signs, which AI had promised me there would be a surfeit of, but there were none. Perhaps I would wind up in a suburb of Baltimore, a neighborhood-to-neighborhood drive with the GPS continuing to say my destination is right around the corner?

 

OK, I exaggerate to make the point that, in spite of all this technology, life in many ways has become more difficult for people accustomed to a TripTik from AAA. I could have followed that! But Baltimore never emerged, and one hour-plus later we drove into the Salem Waterfront Hotel parking lot.

 

We had ambitious plans to visit Gloucester the next day, but we were actually grateful that the next day, a Monday, was rainy and we could rest. So alas, Gloucester and Rocky Neck were taken off our wish list.

 

Thankfully the hotel had a nice restaurant, and so we recovered that Monday, staying at the hotel, unpacking, rethinking our overly ambitious trip, and deciding to stay off the roads the following day and explore Salem.

 

We had decided on Salem as our home base as it was within easy driving distance of other places we wanted to visit. Another motivation was that, after recently seeing The Crucible (and having been associated with my college production of it sixty years earlier) I wanted to see that setting. Even without that draw, there is its waterfront setting, no doubt one of the cities we would have docked in had we boated further north when we were younger.

 

Much of Salem for the visitor consists of witch museums, cemeteries, and the like, such as the hangings.

 

This did not interest us, yet another reason to stay at a hotel away from the tumult. And indeed the crowds were drawn there, leaving us with mostly the waterfront and part of a day to explore the House of the Seven Gables, which became the subject of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel.

 

He lived in Salem, and in fact his birthplace has been moved onto those grounds. The famed house, when Hawthorne wrote his novel, had already been changed from seven gables to three to fit architectural trends at the time, but he had heard stories about it when it had seven, and that number stuck, inspiring his imagining it in the novel. Later owners turned it into a museum and restored the seven gables, even constructing a secret passageway that is implied in the novel but did not exist until the house became famous as a tourist site and museum.

 

Hawthorne Birthplace

So between the House of the Seven Gables, the original home of Hawthorne’s birth, and the beautiful gardens, all looking over Salem Harbor, its historic and literary significance, and 19th-century beauty, made it an ideal destination for us.

 

And it was within walking distance of our hotel, a bonus. We passed the little “Waite & Peirce” National Park Service building, with its pretty clapboard structure built sometime in the early 19th century.

 

Diagonally across the street is the 1815 Customs House, where Hawthorne worked for three years before being ousted by a new administration (the political spoils system; nothing has really changed), which he excoriated in his introductory essay to The Scarlet Letter, “The Custom-House.” (“Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to Paradise.”…Nathaniel Hawthorne)

 

That building is directly across from historic Derby Wharf, which early one morning, as the sun was rising, I walked the entire length to the Derby Wharf Light Station. It was a beautiful morning but becoming hot and humid, not unlike Florida, a disappointment for us remembering the cooler days and especially nights of the Northeast.

 

This bulkhead/wharf reminded me so much of the famous historic stone harbor wall, The Cobb, in Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, although an altogether different construction, a true seawall whereas Derby Wharf was a commercial wharf. But walking nearly a half mile into the harbor and back that morning, the connection could not escape me.

 

Salem has great seafood, and not coincidentally, we had dinner that night overlooking Derby Wharf at the Sea Level Oyster Bar, a favorite among locals.

 

The next morning we got Google Maps to behave and drove to the quiet coastal village of Beverly Farms, where I had hoped to capture a sense of the life John Updike where he wrote and lived for years. The high point was a visit to the Beverly Farms Bookstore, which Updike frequented during his stay there, and we thought the back room still had a sort of shrine to him.

 

Well, thankfully, that independent bookstore is still there, but the so-called shrine had shrunk to but a few of his books. I guess time erases everything, although according to the owner, Updike’s son was recently there to promote his father’s Selected Letters of John Updike, edited by James Schiff, which she showed me. At nearly 900 pages, there was no room left in the suitcases to carry it back home.

 

Updike’s output, poems, short stories, novels, criticism, these letters, was prodigious. He virtually documented his entire life in fiction and nonfiction. I don’t think there is an American writer who comes close.

One of the blessings of an independent bookstore is the knowledgeable owner, and she and Ann got into a discussion about Jane Austen. She said to Ann, “I think you’d like this book,” handing her a copy of The Wedding People by Alison Espach, not known to Ann, a voracious reader. She bought it and, in the next two days, at night, read the entire book (ironic title given we were going to the wedding in a few days), or I should say inhaled it. So that chance meeting led to this satisfying experience. Updike led us to it!

 

We strolled Beverly, drove down the street where he lived, but still weary from our trip, made our way back to the hotel and another great seaside restaurant for lunch, Finz, and then, to prove we were really just tourists, took the sightseeing trolley to get a good sense of the city of Salem. Naturally the tour focused on the witches, the cemetery, etc, but we were exhausted and glad to sit for an hour on such a tour. A high point for us was the Federal-style homes on Chestnut Street, many more than 200 years old, a step back in time.

 

We had made a reservation well in advance for that night’s dinner at Turner’s Seafood at Lyceum Hall, considered a Salem institution with some of the best seafood in New England. The hotel had a jitney to get us there and we Ubered back, so we did not have to do battle with the GPS to get there and park.

 

The restaurant was everything it was purported to be, historic and welcoming. We shared Cherrystone clams, an award-winning lobster bisque, a dish called Tuna Nachos, the most exquisite arrangement of slivers of fresh tuna on a house-baked nacho cracker with wasabi, soy sauce and scallions and other house specialties that lived up to their reputation, and finally, a swordfish and Italian sausage over linguini with fresh ricotta and sun-dried tomatoes (I have my wife to thank for remembering all those details).

 

For our final day we had planned to visit Marblehead, Salem’s immediate neighbor to the south, so it was a nice scenic drive, first to Chandler Hovey Park, with breathtaking views of the Marblehead Lighthouse and the literal hundreds (thousands?) of sailboats in the harbor and the Corinthian Yacht Club.

 

From there we went to the town, where parking is nearly impossible, but drove around on those little curvy 18th-century streets until we found a spot.

 

There Ann found a little boutique store which, naturally, had a “sale” on summer clothing, “coincidentally” just the kind she wears! Also, the careful planning of the store’s owner had provided a “husband’s chair” where I could productively check emails and get out of the heat. The interesting part of the visit (aside from two must-have-half-price outfits) was the story the owner told Ann: that she had been divorced about 50 years ago and the store became her passion, you might say her new marriage partner. And she got to meet interesting people, like Ann!

 

By then we were ready for what Ann had an obsessive craving for ever since we arrived in Salem: lobster. I can eat lobster, but I am no longer a big “fan,” as I once had a lobster license in Connecticut and tended enough lobster pots, which led to our eating LOTS of lobster over those years. I pretty much had my fill, but Ann still loves it, and what better place to have it than a local place, The Barnacle Restaurant, a no-frills, incredibly casual spot, but perched right over the ocean water with views of Fort Sewall.

 

We got there in the nick of time, Ann finally opting for the lobster roll, which was said to have all the lobster you would get in a one-pounder without all the work. This restaurant has its own lobster boat, so it doesn’t get much fresher than that. Here you can see Ann gleefully waiting at our table overlooking the water.

 

The final day was packing in the morning, checking out, and then driving to Sudbury, MA, to visit with our friends Bonnie and Bruce, whom we would see at the wedding the next day. I insisted on a photograph before we headed out to lunch, in the same spot where Bruce and I stood some 50 years earlier in his home in Sudbury (nifty zip code, 01776). And so here we were, then and now.

 

We followed them to one of their favorite lunch spots, Stephen Anthony’s, which Bruce aptly describes as “a staple of the old and doddering.” I followed his lead, having two poached eggs over corned beef hash with their homemade sausage. Better than lobster to me!

 

And from there we drove (all back roads again) to our hotel where coincidentally, at the very same time Jonathan and Tracie were arriving from NYC, so we finally had help with our luggage. Thus, that night marked the onset of the wedding festivities The Long Journey to Chris and Megan’s Day

 

But to close the circle of horrific travel, the day after the wedding, Sunday, we had to catch a 9:00 a.m. flight out of Logan and we were an hour away by car. We had to return the car to the rental center, get on the snaking bus, and then check in at the airport. We got up at 4:45 a.m. to start this ordeal.

 

I figured early Sunday morning should present ideal conditions, especially as the weather was cooperative and our plane was already at the airport. What could go wrong?

 

Indeed, the drive there on the Mass Turnpike was a piece of cake. I was hoping the car rental center would be easy to navigate at this time, but no such luck, frantically waving attendants directing cars into tightly packed lines until finally we were able to park and unload.

 

Back to the four heavy suitcases, which we were finally able to maneuver to the snaking bus, but, again, hordes of other people boarding. I got our suitcases on, got off at Delta, but there was no curbside check-in, and I was absolutely stunned that at 6:30 on a Sunday morning the Delta counters and TSA lines were jammed, the latter seemingly as far as the eye could see.

 

But first, we had to check in, and really the only option was the kiosk, which for us, with my tickets in my iPhone “wallet” was not exactly easy. We were clearly having difficulty. A young woman who was sitting with her grandmother, Internet- and technology-savvy, saw our consternation, took pity on us, and offered to help. What a savior, and we finally printed out our luggage tags.

 

Now the problem was getting the luggage to the Delta counter, for which there was another long line. Our young, savvy damsel said, “Wait here,” and she hopped the rope to the counter and explained to someone at Delta check-in that she was trying to assist two very old people drop off their luggage, so the attendant waved us in. So there are good stories to be told about someone who went the distance for us. Thank you. We’ll try to pass it on.

 

But then there was the TSA line. No way could Ann stand in it and we had an early flight to catch. It didn’t seem to be moving, so we asked for a wheelchair for her. She was given a wheelchair, but there were other people waiting in wheelchairs and there seemed to be only one attendant.

 

Therefore, I walked down the TSA line and finally found a Delta attendant who asked to see my “wallet” and said that there was another line farther down, but a very short one as we had PreCheck (naturally, no signs indication such a line). So, like a miracle, Ann arose from her wheelchair, and no sense recounting our other experiences along the way as we were 99% home, except for the flight, which left on time!

 

I said in my original entry that we would have walked to the wedding if we had to. Turned out, we did a lot of that, but it was an event we would not have missed for the world.

 

Salem Harbor as Viewed from House of Seven Gables