11 March 2004

I Hate Thursday

I furrowed my brow, wondering how this magnificent temple of my mind is crumbling under the weight of the years. Something else happened on September 11th. I knew it, had run across it, was struck by it and could not remember.

I lay flat on my back, looking up. I hate Thursdays. There is a false optimism about Wednesday. Half done! I say, going to lunch in an anonymous tower. Only two and a half to go. Great viewing on the tube Wednesday night. Almost there. Go ahead, treat yourself. Stay up for Law and Order.

Thursday morning the piper must be paid for indulgence. The alarm startles me, the diode blinking red in the darkness. I blink, recalled abruptly from another world and recognize that there is a long way to go, and even so, nothing is going to quite work out the way I thought it would. The former pristine week so filled with promise, was going to be overcome by external events, running us into Saturday and then wrapping around poor still Sunday and into the next pay period, filling the bins of each day to come, stretching out through the middle distance and into a misty faceless future.

I feel the week sitting on my chest, heavy. I scroll the list of things to be accomplished in the remaining two days of work behind my closed eyelids. In the background the BBC told me about sixty Spanish dead in a terror attack in Madrid.

The presumptive villains are the ETA, the vicious violent group of Basque seperatists. The radio reporters say the acronym like it is a word: etta. When I had to worry about being vulnerable in Spain we called the group by the letters. E. T. A.

Maybe we know them better now; maybe we are more intimate, dancing in a way that only lovers and killers understand.

I am glad they were not in the specific business of killing Americans then. They mostly targeted the Guardia Civille. The Guard was a tough lot, in their day, and any encounter with them was problematic. The restoration of the King and the democracy emasculated the Guardia. Probably a good thing, but those tough dark men had an identity that was quite remarkable, capped with those strange black toreador hats. Best not to look amused.

Not that they would take you out to the Playa del Sol and bury you under the dunes like they did to the others when Franco sat in Madrid. Times changed, and we know the Guardia are just traffic cops, mortal, and subject to the law themselves now.

I willed myself into the present, confronting what I must do today. My office has moved, and the new facility is not ready yet. I must visit the airless conference room to pick up some materials to support a meeting with the Deputy Director. There is a happy hour sponsored by the company I am being enticed to leave at the end of this day, and a dinner engagement with my younger son in the County, fourteen traffic-filled miles to slog through.

I feel the resolve begin to congeal within me. There are stories to write, and I should be up and doing it. The past is crying out to me, all the voices, a cacaphony saying: "Remember! Don't forget!" and the future is being born in the present, in the right now, cascading down on me. I can feel it even in the safety of my bed, bomb blasts and weeping.

I wave out my hand toward the other side of the bed, remebering when there was someone there. Something else happened on 9-11. I could not for the life of me recall it.

I am so many places now that I am old, like an ancient thoroughbred remembering the thrill of the jump. In my bed I am part on the heights of Masada above the Dead Sea, looking down at the Roman siege ramp, and part a trooper jumping off a strange antiquated railcar, moving out in the night. The spicy summer heat of Tokyo oppresses me in the little Japanese car, driver's window down, going nowhere fast, and the desert is so crisp at night, the stars bright points and smell of sage rich in my nostrils.

The Chandni Chowk outside the Red Fort is jammed with pedestrians and jeepnies part the crowd like boats in a sea of life. The angry dark eyes peer at me over hawk-like features. I hear a cock crow, and I cannot remember if it is in the rising light of Petionville in Haiti, or out in the Barrio, eyes crusted with sleep in Subic City in the lush green Philippines. The rooster telling me that curfew was done, and the streets were open for travel once more.

What else happened on 9-11? I could not start the day without some small victory. It wasn't Alexander Hamilton being appointed the first Secretary of the Treasury, or the birth of D.H. Lawrence or the deaths of Johnny Unitas and Nikita Krushchev. It was something else, something on the tip of my tongue. I had written about it, hadn't I? Or was it something so strange and incongruous that it sunk just below the level of consciousness, mental flotsam in the working week.

The mist was diminishing and I could see the outlines of the Plantation shutters becoming outlined in gray light. Day was coming to roll over me, ready or not. The Scots got their own Parliament back, after 290 years, and the Stone of Scone was returned to the North. I knew that, I missed the Stone the last time I was in Westminister. It was something else, something in my life.

I poured some steaming hot coffee, black as the night that had passed. I hoped it would scald my brain into activity.

I turned on the laptop and waited for Windows to load. Time to get on with it. The icons were flickering in the grayness and I felt warmth and promise begin to flow into my limbs. Maybe Thursday would be OK, after all.

I reached out to the mouse to guide myself to another beginning. Then it hit me.

Of course.

September the 11th, 1973 was the day the Chilean military blew Salvador Allende to pieces in the Presidential Palace in Santiago. I sighed. It is so hard to keep it straight sometimes.

I picked up my coffee mug, still hot enough to steam. Did you know that Divorce is still not permitted in Chile? It is the last such place in the hemisphere.

Even the Muslims let you get divorced.