The bombings are still fresh. They say that not all the dead may have been discovered and brought home yet. It is dark down in the transit network, some of it new when Victoria mourned her lost Albert. I ache for London, that grand old city. Some of the bombs went off in the same area that the Germans pounded from the sky.

The boxes still had to be moved, and the three young men who came from the moving company were personable and energetic. John was the lea man, and he had to be all of six-foot six or seven. He looked like a baseball player, and he mostly stayed with the truck, while Darryl and DeShawn humped the furniture.

The man who was to deliver the bed did not have their fortitude, or a tighter schedule. He drove by the building, called the land-line in my old unit by the pool and kept rolling. Despite some anguished calls, fate was not going to turn him from his appointed rounds.

No bed. I tried to imagine how angry I would be if I had been sleeping on the floor, waiting the weeks for it to arrive. The radio was blaring in both units. The new one wa cool. Dorothy from Kansas had a medical condition which required oxygen, and hence the unit was sealed from the outside air. The rooms ere cool and dust free. Not like the poolside unit, where the windows were always open and the dust hung thick.

Someone ought to clean this up, I thought. Take some responsibility.

That came from another corner. A previously unknown group claimed responsibility on a web-site associated with Islamic militants, and the common judgment was that it was one of the al Qaida franchises that sent the bombs down into the Tube, and on the bus.

Between the two radios the air reverberated with the new casualty figures. Now a dozen dead, and then two and three. Hundreds wounded.

Nine o’clock, the magic hour, came and went. No follow-on attacks in the U.S. The boxes filled with trash arrived as the ex cleaned out the basement at the expense of my last military move, an echo of a former career, and the last one. 

So it went through the day, filling a shopping cart with loads of books and small things so the movers would not be tempted by them. It was hot and humid, and the skies opened with the remnants of a tropical storm.

At the end of the day, I was exhausted and more stupid than normal. I could not continue a logical string of activities. I did laundry, which had appeared at the bottom of a cart-load of old files and papers. I forgot where the tokens for the washing machine were located, and where I was heating some food.

Completely addled, I folded clothing and threw some at random into a bag. The taxi was coming at 0430, so that I could get through security and on to an airplane to Chicago, for further transport to northern Michigan.

The news at the end of the day was filled with images from a hundred cell-phone cameras of darkness far below ground.

I slept like the dead in the Murphey bed, but roused in time to get in the shower and the cab at the appointed hour. It actually did not matter which order I followed. The rain was heavy, and it did not matter that I went to the wrong airport, or that the first airplane I boarded broke at the end of the runway.

Everyone was quite helpful, and if there was enhanced security, it was not discernable. Presently I was in Chicago, and then on a little Ermbraer jet high above the inland ocean of Lake Michigan. Eventually I was driving a new Mustang fast-back from Traverse City northward, and at the end of the day, I was cooking a medley of fish and chicken on the grill, on the bluff above the bay.

My brother was there, and his many children, and my cousins. And my Mom and Dad basked in the wonder of our generation and the one after that. It promises to be an excellent re-union, and unique in that the guest of honor is not being interred.

That was the point. It shouldn’t take death to bring a family together. But we are all so very busy. The cherries are ripening in the North, and the boxes stacked in the entryway back home can wait.

Around the long family dining table, we ate two cherry pies and one of strawberry. It may have been the largest number who have dined there in living memory.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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