01 May 2007
Knock in the Night
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This is starting off as a strange morning. It is May Day, of course, and a holiday for the last Communists down south. I am looking down at the Chicago River, the sun now nearly full up. I normally get up at 0445, whatever time zone it is and go through the news, listening to the early BBC and try to figure out if there is some tale that needs to be told in the context of the new day, or if there is something from some other day that has an impact- or should have- on where we go from here.
I cannot say that George Tenet is a friend, but in my experience he has a kind heart. I am on his side in this controversy over his book and his views, and think he did the best he could before being awarded his medal and being hung out to dry.
I once looked up, doing my business along the wall in the men's room in the sixth floor of the Original Headquarters Building, you know where, and he was next to me, chomping on that unlit cigar. He gave me a big hello there. He was quite a presence in the building, and we hung out, prepping for one of his first sessions with the new Vice President, who I had served in the First Gulf War.
He was kind enough to let me have Charlie Allen's chair one time at a House Intelligence Committee meeting, waving me in to the only open seat. All the spooks were lined up along the wall of the cramped hearing room in the attic of the capital. And his eulogy for John Millis, the Staff Director of the Committee, when he took his life at that sordid little motel, finally overcome with his demons. Everyone was there. Everyone.
I was thinking of that, listening to the band last night at the Rock Bottom over on State Street. I am not much of a convention-goer, but the drinks and food were free, and there was some flesh to be pressed. I had a seat for a while back by the horn section before business intruded. There were three of them. The man with the saxiphone was too young to have heard the music for real, and the other two probably did.
They played some disco last night, starting, I think, with "Boogie Oogie Oogie," and the young singer with bi hair and towering spike heels was really belting it out. Sitting here, in 2007, I could not help but think of the young people who were first dancing to those songs a quarter century ago, and a mist began to form on the corner of my eye. Where had we all gone, those that danced to that music?
I was far away when it was new, in Japan and Korea, but the music was the same, sung by pretty Filippinas, and cloaked in Yakuza and dark whiskey.
The venue was oddly familiar, yet alien. I hang out occasionally at the sister establishment that is located in the Ballston Mall. I don't particularly like it- I made the mistake of having a business meeting there one night based on its proximity to the Metro. It was dollar beer night, and every twenty-something young professional was jammed in the place and you could not hear yourself think. There was music playing, probably of the sort that someone, at some convention in the distant future when I am in the ground, will start to mist over, thinking of the youth and chances lost.
So, climbing through the e-mail queue this morning there was a short one, a parallel communication that announced a death in the family. Not my family, but one that has an impact on the here-and-now and the future. Families are funny in this bold new age. What with all the marriages, and scrambled relationships between spouses and exes, children and biological connections and moral obligations.
I have only had one, but there are six between the children in my family alone, and when you include the spouses and prospective spouses and their families things begin to get complicated quickly.
The death at hand is apparently optional, not one destined by mischance or diagnosis. Perhaps it is the time of life, but the Reaper seems closer than he once did, and all around.
A close friend has just survived a year in the Green Zone, and his family still has a daughter serving in the Triangle. Death was all around, impersonal as the blast of an improvised bomb. I have a very old friend who is fighting for his life with grace and tenacity right now, so I understand how precious this existence is. The decision to take one's own is a thing that leaves me stupefied. I am broad minded on the subject, and fully recognize that there might come a time when pain could make it an attractive option. It is certainly not the first.
I thought briefly about the professor who advanced to the door of his classroom two weeks ago at VA Tech, and with courage and determination, held the door closed against the deranged gunman long enough to let his students escape. He made a conscious and selfless decision to embrace death, in a higher calling.
To throw life away is almost unimaginable, yet we imagine it each day.
But there it is. There will be consequences and details, and none of them directly affect me. There will be fallout, though, and this is too new an event to understand all the ramifications. It only began last night, with a policeman's fist banging on a door, uniform dark outlined against the streetlight, sorry to bother you, but someone has passed away and the Coroner wanted you to know.
Anyhow, that is the way it is this morning. The rest of life goes on, down the rapids and toward the Falls.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocora.com