 
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
We have been fighting to retain our sense of life's beauty
Tuesday, September 18, 2001
By Elizabeth Boltson Gordon
I picked some flowers from the vase. A magenta blossom like a piece of velvet brain, a sunflower with a rust and yellow corona, a delicate red thistle atop a slender stem; all drooped, had browned and wilted. It was Thursday, they'd been in the house since Monday when I bought them at the farmers' market. I changed the water in the vases into which I had sorted and arranged them on Wednesday, when I accepted we'd be keeping them.
I didn't buy them for us. As usual on Monday, I made a trip to the farmers' market for the fresh fruits and vegetables my husband and I relish in our summer meals. That day I had an additional purpose. I wanted to buy goodies -- tomatoes, nectarines, fresh bread, kirby cucumbers -- to put in my son and his wife's kitchen. I planned to add milk and cereal from the supermarket, and pizza from their favorite take-out place, to greet them on their return home. When they came back from their honeymoon late Tuesday, they wouldn't have to scavenge for a snack and would be set for the next day's breakfast. I decided that the flowers, radiant in bunches in pails on the ground, would be a nice addition. I had long admired them but never bought any. I loved that, in their chaos of colors and profusion of shapes, they looked uncultivated, as if the farmer had taken a scythe to a field of wildflowers and rubber-banded the result.
Tuesday the world changed and the newlyweds didn't come home. But before I go any further, I want to reassure you: This is not a tragedy. My son and his wife were safe in a holiday resort in the Virgin Islands. I spoke with them. Later in the week, when air travel resumed, they came home.
So, this is no big deal, not even a minor footnote to the week's events, really not even worth mentioning. It is certainly nothing like what others are experiencing; not a billionth, a trillionth, of what they are experiencing. I want to make that clear. And yet, they're my children and I wanted them back, felt uneasy until the trip was behind them.
I took walks all week. I tried to make them slow, deliberate, even meditative. I worked at focusing on the leaves of the trees, losing myself in their intricate designs, at discerning the subtle shades of blue in the cloudless sky. The weather -- perfect, in the 70s and sunny -- which first seemed to mock, ultimately consoled. And I soaked up stories of the heroes:
The airline passengers who stormed the terrorists, and died averting greater catastrophe; the firefighters, police and rescue workers who plunged knowingly into the horrors, worked ceaselessly to save others, and sometimes, tragically, perished in the attempt. These people saved more than those they physically rescued. Their ultimate goodness helped restore those, who, like me, had been fighting since Tuesday to retain our sense of life's beauty, our conviction that we are right to revel in its delights.
And isn't that, in the end, our ultimate victory over the despoilers? If we refuse to let them destroy our belief in good over evil, to replace our joy with fear?
The kids got back Sunday night. It took seven changes of plane reservations and a last-minute jumping onto a flight for which they didn't have reservations, but they arrived safely. The flowers didn't make it. More died every day, and I finally dumped them Saturday morning.
I went out and bought a flowering plant. I chose one with lots of unopened buds to unfurl and bloom, one that waited patiently for the newlyweds. They walked in, spotted it and smiled.
Elizabeth Boltson Gordon is a writer living in Point Breeze.