What Remains after 9/11

When I was growing up, if something bad happened to me at a particular place, I did my best to avoid it. Gradually, I let myself approach the bad scene, but still could not bring myself to look at it directly.

Shortly after 9/11, whenever I went downtown I averted my eyes as I approached Ground Zero. It was something awful that had happened to me, and it hurt to come close to it, to acknowledge what I lost. I took furtive glances as I walked down Broadway, at the blackened shell, twisted beams, mountains of debris, cranes, land-movers, and barriers, and a dense penumbra of dust and smoke.

Looking at the disaster up close was troubling, but it was worse to stare at the site from a distance, or from another direction. Looking southward from the Avenue of the Americas, I tried to replace through force of memory the landmark that always indicated south, but there was nothing there, not merely dilapidated but dead and gone. If I pretended that I had not seen New York for thirty years, or that I just arrived, an empty southern vista would be normal. The World Trade towers would be like other New York landmarks that disappeared. But I could not pretend.

That was why I passed the site time and again on my lunch break. I needed to look at the demolition site, because ruins were something; they accounted for what disappeared. Although the towers were never my favorite buildings and I had visited them only a handful of times, I tried to fill in the space they once occupied, with how I remembered them best. I recalled the sensation of walking the curves of Maiden Lane, and suddenly from two blocks away, confronting a bluish glass structure, like a vertical whale, and wondering what it was, to be told that it was the south tower. And I thought, “So that’s where it is.”

During these elegiac visits downtown, I walked back up Broadway and noticed the sign “The Woolworth Building” chiseled over the doors of the skyscraper. I crossed Broadway to admire the tallest building of a hundred years ago, its arches and filigree. I entered a new phase of mourning. My World Trade Center was taken from me, so I consoled myself by taking stock of other landmarks that sustained my New York identity. When I saw the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building through an office window, I stared at them to absorb and savor them. As powerfully built as they were, they might be as vulnerable and transient as I was, so I must preserve them in detailed memories.

It might seem absurd that a person links his identity to buildings. I don’t live or work in any of these places, and did not design them; yet they contribute significant motivation for living here, and they are a source of pride. One of my first defining moments in New York came a few weeks after I arrived. I had just painted my 3-room east village railroad flat when friends invited me for drinks at a midtown bar. After happy hour was over and we’d gorged ourselves on free hors d’oeuvres, my friends led me to the median strip on Park Avenue in the 50s and told me to look up.

In the twilight, colossal Bauhaus skyscrapers, glass and steel, inspiring, terrifying, and clarifying, surrounded and covered me in their shadows. They imposed on me a new perspective of myself in in a world that was alien to my expectations, impervious to my schemes and deaf to my desires. My new self-image was neither grandiose nor romantic--I was reduced to scale. Staring up at those buildings that did not scrape the sky so much as impale it, I could not avoid an emotional response, a sense of where I was, and what my relationship would be to New York. It was an initiation. When confronting structures of such immense scale, you either decided to exist in the midst of the power that built and maintained them, deal with it, perhaps benefit from it, or flee.

I chose to live in New York, to feed off of its size and power. Others no doubt have been repulsed by it. Over the years, I also learned where the small buildings were, the quirky neighborhoods, hidden concrete glades with fountains or waterfalls around the corner from bustling thoroughfares, quiet enclaves in bedlam. I cannot separate myself from New York’s buildings. I wish they had not destroyed the old Penn Station. Whenever I drive down 7^th Avenue and 33^rd Street I mourn a beautiful landmark of which I was deprived and which will never be again. And I am grateful that Grand Central Station still stands.

Now I take stock of what remains. I gaze at the golden roof of the New York Insurance building, and admire that big white cake at 40 W. 23^rd Street, and risk a voyeur’s disgrace by peering at the dark brick façade of the Hotel Chelsea. I stare at buildings whose names do not appear in tour books, because they capture my eye and imagination. If all men are mortal and Socrates was mortal, then the World Trade Center was mortal, and so are all things that humans build. We must do what we can to rebuilt them—in their empty lots and hearts.

TIME VS. TIMEPIECES

I was changing after a recent swim when another man dressing a few lockers down on the same bench observed that I was switching watches. "So you have two watches, one for swimming and another for dress," he noted with ironic amazement.

I was embarrassed to admit that I own more than two watches. I own a dozen, nine of which are functional at any moment, and only five of which I wear on a regular basis.

Then for some reason, pride in timepiece?, I provided him with the extraneous information that my dress watch is also a scuba watch, water tight up to 100 meters, but I am reluctant to wear it while I am swimming laps for fear of scratching it against the bottom of the shallow end. My comrade in exercise smiled ruefully and recounted that he once swam while wearing his prized Rolex and cracked the crystal against the watchband of another swimmer. The Rolex, which had sentimental as well as monetary value, was ruined by the chlorine.

"You must have been heart-broken," I commiserated.

"Actually, it was liberating. We shouldn't be attached to possessions, right?" he asked. "If it were one of the instruments I use in my job, I would be concerned. But a watch is not a necessity."

"In principle I agree with you," I replied. "But I love my watches. Even the ones I never wear. They're talismen. They not only tell time but remind me of times."

He nodded more in sympathy for my mental defect than solidarity with my position.

"I replaced my Rolex with this thirty dollar watch," he said. "It's great. It keeps perfect time, has run on the same battery for eight years, and has other functions, too."

Being a watch-junkie, I was getting excited hearing about this exciting, versatile timepiece and asked him for the brand. Then we discussed the recent vicissitudes of the wrist-watch, how it had once been a token of milestone events--graduation, retirement, etc.--and not everyone had one. But now it was a common and cheap accessory to be purchased anywhere.

"And it's funny that watch lovers like a heavy watch even though it's clunky and gets in the way."

"They'd carry a sundial on their wrists," he said. "The odd thing is that the Swiss wind up and automatic watches don't even keep perfect time and they always need to be serviced. People are stupid."

It's a harmless obsession, I said. And we left it at that.

But like every other conversatio I have had with an intelligent stranger this did not leave me just like that. It shone a thin but penetrating light on some of my least observed values. Why, I asked myself, was I so compulsive about my watches, changing them, and carrying more than one? Did I really need one in a swimming pool? What did it say about me?

My obsession with watches began weeks after the birth of my daughter, when I was smitten by an illustration of a Swiss Army watch in a newspaper ad. The colorful bezel--a metallic lifesaver--and the round, childlike numbers of the dial charmed me even in black and white newsprint. For weeks I struggled with this unforeseen and irrational attraction. I was at the beginning of fatherhood, with a vulnerable baby and wife depending on me, yet I was like a six year old fantasizing about a watch. I did not immediately purchase the Swiss Army watch since I was suspicious and disdainful of my reasons for wanting it. Was I reverting to a childhood lust for toys that coincided with the birth of my child, or acting out my anxiety over the passage of time?

I resisted the whim. I already had a watch. It was the only one I owned in my adult life—an elegant, versatile Seiko my wife gave me unexpectedly one day when I came home from work. She had spent a large fraction of her salary on this gift, and haggled desperately with the store owner to be able to afford it, so it assumed an O Henry Gift of the Magi mystique. It was a versatile timepiece, with a splendid array of functions that I have never seen in any other watch: analog and digital, it told regular and military time, provided the day and date, and had alarm clock and stopwatch functions, too. Everything about it from its wafer thin case to the intricate links of its band was sleek and silver, and it had such catlike reflexes that when it fell off a surface or slipped from my wrist, it always nimbly landed face up. Yet, because this wunderkind of watches had no numbers, and proved too elegant and sophisticated for my mood, and I took it for granted.

For a month, I suppressed my desire for a new watch with numbers by taking long drives. Then circumstances intervened. My wife’s versatile gift watch steamed under the crystal while I was playing basketball. Its hands, if not time, stood still.

The jeweler said that a new gasket would take months to order and insert. I was warned that wearing it everyday might jeopardize its long-term function. Now that necessity justified my craving for a new wristwatch, it flared uncontrollably, so my wife, infant, and I went to a mall where I would find the “number” watch I lusted for.

My wife supported my desire for a new sports watch, but her view was that if I was going to be frivolous, I should be practical. She reasoned that I needed a watch that would be supremely resistant to water. She convinced me to forego the more expensive and, to her mind, juvenile number watch and purchase instead a diver’s watch with bright green circles in place of numbers. She persuaded me that this was what I had wanted all along, although I had never seen it before. I soaked in her excitement by osmosis and enjoyed the diving watch but could never shake the feeling that it was a compromise.

My yearning for a watch with numbers went into temporary remission, but four years later, I found one on sale for $20. It came in a green, fake alligator case that snapped closed. I bought it on the spot. For the first month I had it, I took off my numbered watch at night, buckled it in a circle, and replaced it in its box so that each morning I could relive the thrill of wearing it for the first time. Gradually the fake alligator strap was bitten at the notch where I fastened it and I stopped the ritual of newness. Now, five years later, my numbered watch sits in its box, an unworn relic of a childish fetish.

Since then I have bought five more watches. Now I have more timepieces than days of the week, at least one to match any color and style of clothing. I try to be fair to all of my watches, and give each of them a turn on my wrist. Sometimes, I change watches when I come home so I can give each one a chance.

My only excuse for this conspicuous consumption is that others are apparently as addicted to watches as I am, if the floor space in department stores and catalog pages devoted to watches are any indication. Since, timepiece technology is commonplace and most watches durable and reliable, people must buy watches for other reasons than telling better time. Watches are more about fashion than function. They are accessories that give glitter to the drab conformity of our dress, and say something about the taste, economic status, and aspirations of the people who wear them.

My craving for new watches merits no distinction from other shopping addictions. However, I cling to the redemptive idea that a watch does not measure time so much as console for time lost. When I am stuck in line or waiting for my number to be called, I anxiously consult my watch to confirm my distress. There, with static grace, a beautifully designed face stares back at me with elegant hands and splendid colors. At that moment, the theft of my time and the truth about how little I have are forgotten and I am rewarded by the model of efficiency and art adorning my wrist.

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Election Vs Selection

Every two years or so I am seduced like most Americans into the believing that my most important choice in life is the one I make in a voting booth. I am pulled into the clamor of the political spectacle like a lonely, wide-eyed innocent to a summer carnival. I listen to loud pundits, who like barkers, call out the exceptional value of their opinions. I watch commercials with amusement, and listen to thunderous oratory. Despite the boisterous and burlesque tone of election campaigns, I am admonished time and again to take the process seriously and to be informed. Presented with various candidates, I am warned that my choice will have lasting consequences in my life and the lives of hundreds of millions of others. The process ends when I enter a booth behind a plastic drape, pull switches, yank a lever—elect!

The hype about elections is the biggest scandal in American life. The notion that my choice of pre-selected politician will define or change my life is as preposterous as the assertion that which TV show I watch will have lasting impact on my health.

At best, the election is a surrogate for all the smaller decisions in my life that are vitally important and more difficult to make—my selections.

As we muddle along we tell ourselves that our electoral decisions are meaningful and that we would be wise to prepare ourselves to make the right choice. We fantasize that our elected officials from president to surrogate judge will save us. By electing the right politician we will be made whole again, our problems will be solved, our bad luck reversed, our choices—those that were good but soured and the ones bad from the start—will be rectified and redeemed. Elections by this measure become a secular rite of ablution and healing.

Only afterward, when we see that whomever we elected did not appreciably change anything, and that they either blundered or were besmirched by scandal, do we see the error of our false hopes. And of course, we react with one more dose of the same purgative—we vote the rascal out.

Elections are a symbolic quick fix to distract us from real choices that are more personal and private—and more urgent—the choices that really matter and that truly affect the course of our lives—let’s call them “selections.” Elections are the periodic consolation prize for the choices that would matter most if we could make them—the selections we don’t have an opportunity to make, or those we make poorly. These are selections like what job we ultimately get, who our bosses really are, and what our colleagues are like.

The election process is a generalized and symbolic representation of the selection process. In the former, we are given more information than we can possibly use and much of it is worthless. In the latter, we are always given less information than we need. Selection is a far more critical to our individual happiness than an election, and far too complex and specific to discuss with others. Elections can agitate you, become a part of your life and burrow inside your psyche, but their impact dissipates like an alcoholic beverage. Selection penetrates you to your very depth and its impact never leaves you. Each selection you make enters your personal history, become a feature of your psychic topography, a tattoo no laser can remove. You wear it behind your eyes and in the bend of your smile.

Indeed, selections are so personal and indelible that nobody except maybe your mother and car salesman would offer to help you make one or even discuss it. When you try to talk about your quandary in making an important and difficult selection, those whose opinions you solicit will tell you they cannot help you—selection is an act you must perform on your own. This same hands-off dread of guilt for squandering or destroying someone else’s life by tampering with their choices does not apply to elections—the surest proof of how unimportant elections truly are. Loud people carrying signs shout at you as you approach the polling place about the candidates they want you to vote for right until you open the door of the polling place and walk in. the moment that you enter the official polling place.

The torture of selection was never more vividly and humorously depicted than in the game show Let’s Make a Deal. We felt little rubber hammers of pain on our hearts as we watched endless mini-tragedies that poor selection could bring. As avaricious contestants squandered money in hand for a donkey behind door number two, we cringed because we knew we could do the same. Selection is just too hard.

If selection were not so hard, we wouldn’t care so much about elections. They are public rituals that permit us to release personal steam from the selections that we make with imperfect knowledge and are stuck with. They give us the chance to talk openly about choices that have little personal consequence while we deal privately with those that bend our twist our lives. Since elections really don’t change our lives so much and selections do, perhaps we should think less about being an informed electorate and more about being wise selectors.

Of course, corporations and wealthy private contributors would have little interest in influencing or helping us with making wise selections. A fortune can be made exploiting public policy, but no money to be made in promoting personal happiness

The Cicada: Is Democracy Better Than Monarchy or What Kind of Choice Is This Anyway?

I am like a political cicada. My interest in all things electoral emerges periodically, then abruptly disappears. For awhile I am passionate about my views; I make predictions, learn all I can about the candidates and the issues, until I realize that political events supercede my control, while outcomes confound my understanding and frustrate my will. My interest, which arose out of some unconscious need, recedes.

This cycle of interest arousal and loss is partly biological. At times, I awake from social hibernation, I look around me with blinking eyes, am disquieted by what I sense, and feel an urgent necessity to take interest in the world; I suspect that some of this interest is manufactured out of temporary boredom with my own life and preoccupations.

However, the more immersed I become in the political spectacle, the more tedious, repetitive, and inaccessible the action and verbiage become. By comparison, my own life seems more interesting. At least it is unambiguous and I have some control over it. Of course, interest in politics might be more abiding if my presidential preferences were occasionally reflected by electoral outcomes. This never happens.

In all the elections I have seen, my favorite candidate has never even made it to nominee. It is an ignominious record of selection futility. And of course, I believe that the best candidate has never even run for president. So when elections come, I am always in the booth between the levers of two evils, agonizing which is the lesser.

This kind of participation grows tiresome . It is like trying to support one of two teams in the Super Bowl when you are indifferent to both. Fortunately, I have liked more football teams that made it to the Super Bowl, more teams that won the World Series, even more hockey teams that won the Stanley Cup (and I rarely follow hockey) than I have presidential candidates who made it to the general election. Otherwise I would have neither sports nor politics to comfort me.

Some would say my election ennui would metabolize to excitement if I became more involved. But I think this would only make it worse. It is emotional quicksand--something makes you sick, so you do more of it? This is tantamount to advising someone who likes their wine too much to switch to hard liquor--so their inebriation will be more efficient. My problem is both chronic and acute. It drives me beyond cynicism, beyond iconoclasm, all the way to apostasy. I actually begin to contemplate whether the democratic presidential election as a leadership-delivery system is so great a political improvement over monarchy.

I wonder if the primitive African tribes that made their chieftain candidates run a brutal gauntlet were not more prescient than primitive. (If the candidate survived, he won!) Will mankind in 3000 look back and determine that democracy was not all that? That is no political improvement overall, but just the desperate flailing response to a few bad monarchs? When taking all the authoritarian and democratic leaders into account, will elections prove a better modality for selecting leaders than the divine right of kings or the mandate of heaven? I can't presume to know.

What I do know is that a least with monarchy, you don't go through the motions of believing you have a real choice, that is someone you really like or trust or believe in, or that you are deciding between two disparate individuals. The king or queen are who they are--they are rich, they are pampered, they are lucky--and you accept them or ignore them. Whereas, in our system, you're always stuck with two strangers with two different faces that you have choose between, like two different faces, but always on the same coin.

This charade of choosing a president in our system is exemplified by the risible uproar over Senator McCain's senior moment about how many houses he owns. Chances are he has never even lived in all his homes. Like the rich man in Satyricon who cannot be bothered to look at financial records that are six months old, McCain has more important matters on his mind than his precise wealth. And so, for that matter, should the Democratic leaders, who are also far wealthier than the electorate. Senator Obama is a multimillionaire, who resides in a multi-million dollar home and vacationed in The Bahamas and Hawaii in the past five months. Do the Democrats expect us to vote for their candidate because he is rich, but not as rich as his opponent, and thus more sensitive to the problems of the poor and middle class in coping with the present economic conditions?

The same presumptuousness infects the Democratic Party as a whole Democrats tout themselves as being better equipped to fix the economy. But with the exception of The New Deal and the Great Society, when have the Democrats or their government model created jobs? And even when the jobs were created, were they jobs that most Americans would want, or were they the kinds of jobs that are government-made and disappear as soon as budget cuts are required?

My sense of our two-party system is that the Republicans believe in a system that works for very few people. But at least they are honest about it. The Democrats, meanwhile, pretend that they want to help and can help the many people for whom the system rarely if ever works. And then, of course, even when they are elected, they fail to redeem their promises...always blaming someone else for their failure. (We didn't get affordable federally subsidized health care in the 1990s and we haven't gotten out of Iraq since the Dems took over Congress in 2007). At least with the Republicans, you know as a voter what you are getting and where you stand. The Democrats are like smooth-talking insurance salesmen who sell you a phony policy. Or like the fraternity brother who is supposed to catch your stiff body when you fall backwards in a game of trust and then lets you fall down a flight of stairs.

Memory Sustains Life

I have always had a good memory. Except for students in school, memory is a faculty in general disrepute. It is far better to be spontaneous, instinctive, and bold. Memory is deemed most useful to those who are aged and past prime--and who ironically may lack it. Memory must be promoted before it becomes obsolete.

People are obsessed with knowing what is happening right now and in trying to predict what will happen in the next moment.

We are "dated" when we reference the past. Worse, we are identified as living in the past, which is deemed pathological and pathetic. Looking forward is heroic and brave...looking backwards is a good way to get whiplash.

History was once promoted as a prescription for improvement. Many of us believed that by knowing the past we could avoid repeating it. This wisdom has been trumped by the theory of eternal repetition. We know that we must repeat the past in variation because beneath our sophistication, we are animals that must repeat ourselves in order to live--and die.

Meanwhile, we move toward the future, not walking briskly, or steadily, or in a straight line. Rather we dance in great circles, spinning in a direction not always apparent, beguiled by the music in our minds.

Luckily, there are many good things to remember...college is one.

It may not reflect any other experience we ever have, but this is not a bad thing. If each of us can experience an exception to the realities of living, then why would we ever deprive ourselves of this for several years on the cusp of turning adult?

I recently showed my wife and teenage daughter the campus of my alma mater on our way home from a vacation. It was my first time back since I graduated more than thirty years ago. I could not believe how many new buildings there were and how new the older buildings appeared. I always remembered my dorms as having dark facades, but they looked scrubbed and new.

We drove around the campus, on the sidewalks as well as the campus maintenance roads--they looked alike. We must have been the only ones on the premises on the second day in August. It had rained profusely in the area that afternoon. Steam lifted from the pavements and the grass and drifted among the trees. The light was neutral, pure, and honest, and the colors expressed themselves in depth.

It is a small place but the long absence increased the distance. There were many new buildings, and I struggled to remember what many of the old ones were for. The building where I had received my mail had become a library. So much for memory!

But the power of memory is borne out by the fact that I am writing an essay about this obscure homecoming. Essay writing is one experience I remember most about my liberal arts education. I wrote many essays for four years, then entered a world in which essays were not much valued anymore. Still I am grateful for the legacy. It is useful and enjoyable to be able to improvise thoughts, to find their unseen relationships, and inherent structure. I do it whenever I can. Memory sustains life, but so does practice.

Memorial Day, the Premature Summer Holiday

Memorial Day weekend has likable qualities but the weather usually isn't one of them. Of course, any long weekend has a claim to public affection, as an atoll of leisure in an ocean of work. Memorial Day is one in a series of rest-stops in the calendar that includes Labor Day, Columbus Day, and President’s Day--secular holidays whose solemn, original meanings have been obscured by the universal need for respite and relaxation that they partially fulfill.

What makes Memorial Day special and endearing is that it is such a screw-up. With its sibling holidays you know what to expect. M.L. King Day is solemn and cold. President’s Day usually brings the first foretaste of spring, longer daylight, and winter clearance sales. Labor Day is the last summer holiday, when the shadows of shorter days fall earlier and more profoundly, a harbinger of cooler seasons ahead, regardless how humid the air or how high the heat. But you never know what to expect of Memorial Day because it has been forced to overachieve in play a role for which it may not be qualified.

Memorial Day is the prodigal child of holiday weekends. It makes no grandiose claims for itself, but carries our impossibly high expectations. Memorial Day is like most children--hopeful, impatient, and eager to please those implacable adults who pressure it to be what they want it to be. We ask Memorial Day to be the first summer holiday when it is more apt to be the last holiday of spring, falling as it does squarely in the milder season. We ask Memorial Day for beach weather while the ocean is still chilling after a long winter. We ask it for barbecue skies when over the past century, it has rained on Memorial Day one day out of three.

Perhaps the most confusing quality of Memorial Day is that its name denotes solemnity, mourning, and a mood more conducive to houses of worship, yet it has become a major symbol of summer frivolity and spending, inducing somber reflection only by seaside merchants lamenting poor business when Memorial Day is a rainout. In essence Memorial Day is when we drink and grill hotdogs to honor the dead.

I remember Memorial Day before it was the last Monday of May, packaged for a convenient holiday weekend. In those days it was specific to a date, May 30, and was celebrated inconveniently in mid-week, like the 4th of July, if that was when it fell, . Because it was one isolated day, it was a good sleeping day, not much for cook-outs and get-togethers. Falling at the end of May it was usually steamy and warm, a 75 degree soup, and overcast. The languor I associate with Memorial Day, a bilious boredom, is doubtless due to these first impressions of childhood. It was a day off when the weather was depressing and nobody was around to play with--a wasted day.

Since that time there have been some good Memorial Days. I once attended a fine barbecue in the surprising concrete backyard of a tenement building in the west 30s. That was a Memorial Day weekend that lived up to its summery expectations. It was also a funny occasion because it was the last time I saw men cling so tenaciously to their role as barbecue cooks. The anointed few stood over the open charcoal grill in white aprons and snowy toques and did not cede or share for a moment the priestly task of turning the drumsticks every few minutes. It occurred to me that cooking, boiling and all preparations involved with water might fall to women, but men were still consider ourselves the masters of flame, the stokers of the fire.

In some way, Memorial Day is Rorschach for how one feels about summer, especially the summer ahead, for which it is the ceremonial portal. When I was in college, Memorial Day marked the start of a long, hot summer of menial work to earn college tuition. Thus Memorial Day was unavoidably tainted by the summer that ensued. It was like Sunday evening before a dreaded workweek that in my case would last twelve weeks.

As an adult, I recall another Memorial Day that produced acute anxiety. I was in a rock and roll band that was breaking up after a busy but fruitless May. On Memorial Day I woke up at 6 AM, acutely and prematurely alert as only fear can make me. I was immediately aware of how long the summer stretched before me and had no clue what I would do without a band or a job or friends to hang out with. There would be little opportunity or money with which to continue my pursuits. Memorial Day marked an off-season for rock and roll, a recreation of the night and an on-season for the beach and other wholesome places. People who had places out of the city to go to went and the city, usually a magnet, was now abandoned to those who were trapped here. On that Memorial Day I grieved for the career that had not taken off and took stock of my situation. I was broke and alone, and I knew I would need to find a job under difficult circumstances.

Memorial Days have had their share of drama. I lost two wallets on Memorial weekend--both were found. On the first occasion, I found it between my car seat and the door. On the other, I roamed the entire neighborhood looking in trashcans the night I discovered it lost. The next morning, the finders called me. When they gave me the wallet they lamented that there was no money in it. I lamented with them. Of course, I was teaching at the time.

With a school age child, Memorial Day becomes just another long holiday in which the final projects and reports must be done. One of my best Memorial Day memories as a parent was when my daughter was wrapping up her kindergarten year. I had just started a new career and my daughter was doing her final science project--a wetlands diorama. We went to the park and foraged in the grass and under the trees for twigs, handsomely shaped stones and curious artifacts to put in the environment populated by plastic alligators, snakes and frogs. It was a warm, sultry day like the ones I remembered as a child, but it felt so much better now. I was able to exorcise some of those bad old feelings. Being with my family, I realized that Memorial Day was never at fault for how I felt back then. It was always loneliness.

Since I am more settled in my wage-earning ways, Memorial Day has become more of a spectator sporting event. I listen to people’s plans for this holiday, and watch them pull their suitcases to taxis en route to glamorous destinations. Then I watch to see what the weather will do. In the past thirteen years it has rained more often on Memorial Day than it has not. I meanwhile catch up on things I need to do--like sleep and laundry.

What I like most about Memorial Day is that it is such an absurd hero of the calendar, assuming its gratuitous place in the year, struggling to be what it cannot be, and to do what it can do only with luck --provide a worthy introduction to the summer for which it comes a month early. Memorial Day is the holiday that pushes and overachieves. It demonstrates the American penchant for coaxing nature into a new order that is unnecessary even if it might be more convenient, like damming great rivers and draining great swamps. Dedicated to freedom, rooted in chaos, steeped in stress, we retain a poignant attachment to order and balance, an affinity which Memorial Day expresses. Do we need an unofficial start to summer that is a month early--a marker to balance The 4^th of July and Labor Day? No, but it would be nice. So we force an unreliable spring day to be the first unofficial day of summer. Then we proceed to feel miserable and betrayed when it lets us down.

Memorial Day is a thoroughly human invention: paradoxical, whimsical and grim. It gratifies our need for pleasure while calling itself a day of patriotic mourning. It bespeaks the child in us that cannot, will not wait, that demands a summer holiday NOW although summer is a month away. It springs from the stubborn need that compels boys to play basketball in darkness and rain and grown men to hit golf balls in the snow. This holiday does not commemorate youthful romps any more than it honors fallen heroes. It epitomizes the rashness, impatience and hopefulness with which we view ourselves and our lives, as well as our frivolous genius for bending anything to our stubborn will. The failure of Memorial Day to fulfill the puerile yearnings we force upon it may be what the memorial is all about.

Vote for Others, But Vote Yourself

Candidates tell us who they are by crafting autobiographies to win our support. Yet, regardless how artfully they shape our perceptions, the monologue ineluctably becomes a dialogue, as political autobiographies are translated and transformed by the electorate. Candidates are like distant stars whose light comes to us from so far away that we can never be certain who and where they are, so we stuff the ballot box with our own resumes, superimposing ourselves and our lives on political figures. In a Utopian democracy, citizens would assess the contenders, their experiences, and positions on the issues, sift through their records and vote for the individual most likely to do the best job. But voting is self-expression; we vote who we are. Politicians want us to vote for their autobiographies but we vote our own.

• 
  

I relate to Hillary Clinton. This was not always the case. When she was First Lady, I had a chance to see her make a public appearance at a local hospital, but I never made it. Over time, Hillary Clinton has shown great intelligence, courage, and perseverance. She is a diligent and ambitious individual who works toward goals and takes nothing for granted. She is sincere in her commitment to public service and causes that matter to her. She is remarkably resilient. When she fails in one initiative, she finds other ways to be effective. Although often characterized as deceptive, Mrs. Clinton is as trustworthy as you would want your attorney to be—shrewd, meticulous, discreet, and cool under fire. You want Hillary Clinton on your side, never against you.

Often depicted as arrogant and ruthless by her critics, Hillary Clinton has heroic attributes. She has risked substantial rewards for greater ones and has sacrificed simple pleasures and security for public service. Mrs. Clinton has a long record of subordinating self-interest for causes and people she believes in. She is a politician of surprising skill, who has shown quick thinking, supple wit, and sharp timing in various circumstances. She is also a warrior—brave, strong and resolute before a fusillade of attacks that would waste a more fragile individual. Despite her many admirable traits, Mrs. Clinton most of all evokes sympathy because she has incurred the anathema of most of the media. Like the furies of Greek myth, pundits swarm about her, belittling her accomplishments and gauging at her smallest mistakes.

Mrs. Clinton has compared herself to “Rocky,” the dogged underdog, an almost laughable persona for such a dignified, studied and intelligent woman. But the comparison is surprisingly apt. Like Rocky, one of the most appealing aspects of Mrs. Clinton is her capacity to overcome. Her greatest obstacle is her failure to live down to general expectations of women. One subtext to Hillary-bashing is that she is more than a woman and not woman enough. She is perceived as too smart and tough to be feminine and maternal, too calculating to be likeable; Like Rocky, she is viewed as a plodder, who compensates for a lack of natural talent by working hard and wearing down her. The list of her real and imagined defects is long--not a great orator, too detailed, too divisive--yet, Mrs. Clinton has always been more than equal to every fight she has been in. Since she is frequently underestimated, she plays the thankless public role of striver, climber, and over-achiever. Regardless how well she does, her detractors cannot bring themselves to believe it. At each phase of this primary season she has been counted out—even after she repeatedly postponed her political obituaries.

Apparently, many in the media hate the idea of Hillary Clinton becoming her party’s nominee. She is treated like a party-crasher who has overstayed her welcome, or worse, as a contemporary Lucretia Borgia. The irony is that Hillary Clinton is who our country needs now—a steely and efficient leader who will take being president as seriously as running for office. Like Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, Mrs. Clinton has the stature, strength and gender novelty to lead her nation in a new direction. Yet despite her eagerness to serve and a character that thrives in the kind of adversity we face, the media despises her for reasons more relevant to how they feel about women than to Hillary Clinton’s qualifications.

• 
  

Senator Obama evokes the image of a precocious lad who studied hard and behaved well so that he could make his family proud. When I look at a picture of myself as a six year old with a wise expression on my face, I see this same quality. It is a desire to be more, to make others proud, to save myself, my family and the world. The photograph of Obama in African garb was interesting not because he looked like a Muslim, but because he resembled a child on a field trip. He has retained a youthful quality, a whimsical air, and a childlike stubbornness to have the world conform to his specifications, which is different than it is. All of this may explain his appeal to young people even though he is middle-aged.

I feel I know Barack Obama from early school days. He evokes for me every class rival I had, whom a teacher preferred for intangible factors that I could not quantify, like temperament and personality―likeability. When I was in school, I smarted under this favoritism, sometimes in very real ways that would bear on my opportunities and my future, and I see an intrinsic unfairness in Senator Obama’s ascendancy. When he does well, Senator Obama seems to be appreciated more for who he is than for what he does. When he errs, he receives indemnity. When he loses—as in Texas and Ohio—he wins. When his judgment, on which he stakes his superiority, is debunked, by his twenty year friendship with a vituperative minister, he is allowed to repair it with a speech, and his advocates tell the public to forgive and forget.

Barack Obama seems more comfortable as a writer than as a politician. When he runs into trouble, his impulse is to write a speech. Since I am a writer, I like this quality, but how well would it work in a chief executive? A writer and a politician are designed differently. The politician is responsible to others; the writer to himself. The writer must reflect; the politician must act. The writer is a loner by temperament; the politician must be a 24/7 extravert. Most importantly, the politician must either hide his moral failings and dilemmas or be close to perfect; he must be unwavering in what he professes to think and believe. The writer is the eternal skeptic, turning thoughts, feelings and attitudes over and over like a barbecue, exploring, indulging, and exposing self-doubts, ambivalence, and moral crises.

When I was fifteen I exchanged the role of the student politician—a precocious “fine young man”—for the dark, ironic persona of a modern writer. Senator Obama never made that transition. He continues to play the role of good citizen required of the politician, although in his heart he may wish he were a writer. When he faces a crisis, he tries to defuse it with words rather than decisive action. How does his ambivalence play out? If President Obama faced a calamity would he retreat to his study like a literary Nero to write a speech while the nation burns?

I also see race in Barack Obama’s story, although I am told I should not do so. His autobiography is supposed to be about a man who beat enormous odds, but Senator Obama has been promoted in part by the collective social guilt of private and public institutions like colleges, universities, and media organizations. When Senator Obama made his “race” speech, the media issued a predictably favorable review. They described it as if they were teachers extolling an “A” paper—although he failed to address the assignment. While falling over themselves to praise his summary of racial conflict in America, the media ignored that Senator Obama did not explain how he—a socially aware and intelligent adult—could associate so closely and for so long with a man who expressed bigoted invective to hundreds of people every week.

Finally, I cannot separate Senator Obama from my indignation at the media’s favoritism toward him. My view of him has more to do with how he is perceived by others than with who he is. Of course, this opens a paradox: without the media and the money behind him, why would I know about him at all?

• 
  

Of all the candidates with stories, John McCain gives me the most hope for my own life. This uplift has little to do with his ideology, party affiliation or stand on specific issues. John McCain’s appeal is not primarily about politics. He is trans-political in the same way that Natan Sharansky; Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa are trans-political. All are freed men, who walked out of prisons intact and contributed to their countries. McCain's stature overflows the banks of politics because he sees a world and a reality beyond polls, elections and sound-bytes. His world-view appears to be derived from the world—a reality beyond politics, which government plays only a part. Because Senator McCain has seen life and death and survived in that corner where government rarely goes, he can separate himself from politics, to speak as himself, not as a public figure, to possess an ironic distance from the scene and moment he occupies. His wryness, candor, and occasional pique--very unpolitical behavior--suggest that his political performance is superimposed on an internal soundtrack. He treats politics as something less than life and death, and can make the distinction between living and dying and winning and losing.

Although John McCain endured a circumstance that we have no right to think we can imagine, his story strikes us powerfully real. Perhaps this is because reality imposed itself on his life. John McCain was transformed and nearly destroyed by circumstances. The Republican nominee stands as an icon of redemption, not the moral redemption of a man who took campaign contributions from a dishonest businessman only to co-write a campaign finance reform law. His life was redeemed from captivity and death and extended to serve its current purpose. He is not the hero of victory, but survival. In this sense he offers hope to everyone.

The arc of John McCain’s life is tragic. An ordinary man with common flaws—the resume of a classic tragic hero—McCain had every reason to be confident—a military pedigree, an Annapolis degree, the ability and training to fly planes—until a tragic event nearly took it all away. John McCain’s pedigree and privilege could not save him from the harsh vagaries of war—being shot down, wounded, captured and held in a POW prison. He might have died and never been heard of again. Instead, he survived five years of incarceration and torture and returned to the United States to enter public life. He stands before the American people as a guileless survivor, stripped of artifice, who sees beyond politics because his most powerful experiences were outside of it. What draws me to Senator McCain is his status as the prisoner who escaped. It gives me hope that in my own life I can escape the prison that holds me, even if it has bars that others do not see.

John McCain offers himself as proof that one should never surrender, regardless how hopeless a situation. His candidacy demonstrates why courage and perseverance matter. Pundits talk about a political life, about political death, about politics as a blood sport, but McCain’s presence on the political stage belies those claims. McCain reduces politics to its appropriate, often trivial proportions. McCain casts an ironic shadow over the process because his experience belongs to a reality that exposes politics as an artful simulation of life produced by light and shadow. He has been able to weather political tempests like the Keating scandal that would have smashed less resilient figure precisely because he has seen worse.

Distance is a rare quality in a politician that would seem indispensable for high office. But like any quality it is a question mark. It can take the form of needed perspective or self-righteous detachment. With John McCain this is the risk the voter takes. However, he has proven a capacity and willingness to cooperate with politicians who differ in ideology, to work for reform, and to assume positions unpopular with his party, so there is reward with the risk. Ultimately, what makes McCain an intriguing candidate is that he does not take politics too seriously or as an end in itself, but as a means to get to something beyond it. His prior experience has taught him the brutality and randomness of life, left scars and given him a sense of what is real. In the virtual world of sound-byes and spin, his authenticity seems more important than ever.

• 
  

I vote myself. But once I have projected my story on the candidates, I turn on the lights and look in the mirror. How can I vote myself until I can see myself? When I look at my situation I no longer see Clinton, Obama, or McCain. I see a man in a world no candidate can see, imagine, or positively change, a world as many light-years from these luminaries as they are to me. I live in a world where government seems to be ubiquitous when you step out of line or look at your paycheck. But government is invisible when you drive on the shoddy roads, need to ask a question, or solicit help of any kind. Each day, I struggle for basic needs, while I am aware that many people face more difficult circumstances. I have no illusion that presidential candidates cannot deliver to me anything I need.

Once elected, over whom and what does the president preside?

Is the United States the new Rome or the new Holy Roman Empire? Can one political figure, with duties adumbrated in our constitution, bring coherence to our palimpsest of governments, regions, communities, markets, industries, interest groups, ethnicities? How did they live, work, and procreate without coherent political and social structures and institutions? Now I understand that long epoch because despite all of our technical advances, we are now in a dark age of omnipresent danger, of warring elements at every level of existence. I do not feel I belong to a coherent and cohesive order. I pay taxes to several layers of government. But if a problem arises in my life for which I need help from higher temporal powers, I am routed to web-sites, 1-800 numbers; I leave messages and am left to my own devices—and prayers. Computers and the internet have given us the illusion of a community, by bringing us so close to information, opinions, products and services, but they are rendering obsolete the human contact on which actual community and social order are based. Perhaps all periods in human history have been characterized by a fluctuating balance of order and disorder, control and chaos. I was always mystified and amazed that people survived the dark ages. We are now in a period of controlled chaos.

Will the political sphere and my world ever intersect? Or are they meant to remain parallel, one reflecting the other, like the mythic world of the constellations the ancients gazed upon for nocturnal entertainment? Maybe if we act as it is a democratic society it will be one. Maybe if we act as if our votes matter, they will assume the power we wish they had. Perhaps the government will do more than collect taxes and wage war.

Ultimately, politics is the alpha and omega of reality shows. Like any competitive spectacle I choose my favorite, hope he or she wins, am mildly satisfied if they do, am temporarily irritated if they lose, and push my life forward regardless of the outcome. This may sound cynical and passive, but I can do no better from my remote vantage point. I am unable to see the true candidates from behind their handlers and the media and so I am mistrustful of the entire process. This criticism may sound like the unreasonable critique of an amateur astronomer who complains that he cannot see the stars for the street lights. If we only become familiar with the candidates through the dark, distorted lens of the media, how can we complain? Without the media, we would know them less.

Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself,” Michel Montaigne wrote in “Of Husbanding the Will.” This is the psychology of the average voter. We vote for others, but ultimately we vote ourselves—our needs, hopes, and aspirations. We view our politicians as instruments or impediments to our will, but at the end of the day, they are like the constellations the ancient star-gazers saw in the night sky—avatars of the imagination who provide entertainment and help us dream.

Hair Piece

Hair, a.k.a. human plumage, may be dead stuff on our head, but it is also the original status symbol, a hood ornament indispensable to the car’s value. Having good hair is critical to success. When I started losing mine I was young. Issued a standard older image, I needed to adjust. From being the hero of my own story, I became a sidekick to no one in particular, a bit player in a blockbuster epic titled “Everyday Life.” Hair loss is a life-changing injury. It does not alter how you walk or talk, but how you are perceived, thus damaging your social persona, which informs and motivates all that you do. When your hair goes, you are demoted from the physical elite, exposed as defective, abased by nature, spoiled by age. It is a social law. I have heard men say they look at woman’s body, not her face, and women often focus on a man’s eyes—but both genders care about hair.

Hair loss is fate made manifest in a first impression. Other flaws escape censure—for awhile. Bad teeth can be whitened, capped or hidden—if they are molars. Obtuseness can be muted by reticence or improved with coaching. If you are mean, incompetent, witless, or insane, people might not catch on if you are discreet. But hair loss is public and in plain sight, a matter of record. People you meet may not remember your name or the color of your eyes, but they will recall if you had hair. You cannot hide or run from hair loss. Try at the risk of ridicule.

Americans believe in human perfectibility, but hair loss is that curious exception. With most defects, people appreciate any effort to improve. If you are ignorant they admire your initiative to read a publication or to do a word puzzle. When you have halitosis, you are respected for using mouth wash, chewing gum or popping mints. But the mere attempt to improve or mitigate hair loss with hair weaves and toupees heaps abuse on men who wish to thus elevate their status.

This is no abstract law of human behavior, but based on empirical evidence. I once stood in a Kinko’s behind a distinguished Asian man in a suit and tie. He had the nervous manner of a junior professor running late for the key presentation of his career. He also had a hair weave puffing up in back like the neck of a mating frigate bird. The hair to which it attached had grown and now the weave was levitating off his head. He needed it “restrung” like a tennis racket. Other customers on line, hardened by boredom, pointed, tittering, at the weave in limbo between hair and hat. Fortunately, the distinguished man was too nervous to discern their mirth. His preoccupation with color copies and lateness shielded him from humiliation. However, a day of reckoning was on this professor’s agenda. He was on a collision course with a grim discovery—his hair weave was stabbing him in the back.

Toupees are also objects of ridicule. They are called “rugs” for a reason. A floor covering now sits on your head. If a man wears a toupee two things must be true: he has great fortitude and confidence; and his toupee is imperceptibly natural. Otherwise he will suffer great torment, since people are ruthless about outing a toupee. An incident comes readily to mind. A corpulent, ugly man I know with mephitic breath and poor social skills, considers himself superior to bald men because he has a full head of hair—and he has no compunctions about “pulling rank.” At a Barnes and Noble “Meet the Author” reading, this hair supremacist heckled the popular author of a self-help book because the man wore a toupee. During the Q&A, the hirsute lout asked the speaker, “How dare you give people advice when you have a dead musk rat on your head!”

Why will people let you improve your mind but not your head of hair? This prejudice does not apply to women with dyed hair, wonder bras, and compressing body shapers. We do not care if the results are factitious; to the contrary, we credit these women for valiantly trying to improve their assets and make themselves more appealing. However, bald men are held to a higher ethical standard. We are compelled to flaunt our flaw everyday. It must be a conspiracy to oppress the masculine majority, who share this common defect, and to uphold a hair-centric social order. Hair might seem an odd and impractical organizing principle, but it has one powerful attribute—simplicity. Hair is a symbol for power, a sexual marker, and a symbol of youth. Hair retention and loss therefore is a fast and easy test of natural selection and a sign of divine favor. A full head of hair on a man is rare enough to suggest genetic election to nature’s elite, while hair loss is common enough to provide a massive under-class, essential for paying taxes, making war, and doing the menial tasks that keep society running.

Why do we need such an arbitrary social marker? Because there is too much equality in the world and it confuses people and makes us unhappy. There is a surfeit of educated men, strong men, men with jobs, cars, a proficiency in foreign languages, a taste for good food and wine. A quick and easy way is needed to separate wheat from chaff. If men are allowed to cheat on their appearance with fake air, how can women weed out the losers?

Of course, hair is more complex than having it or not. Among hirsute, young men more subtle comparators rule—good hair, bad hair, weird hair, irresistible hair, hair better kept short. However, such distinctions fade as follicles die and their mention can arouse memories and regrets in men wish they could still make them. My hair is now sparse and though I want to claim I once possessed a magnificent mane, the Polaroid documentation does not exist. Even when my hair was abundant it was a mixed metaphor—doing too much at once. It was a bramble, not a rolling meadow—dense, difficult, tortuous. It was turbulent and wavy as high tide on a rocky shore with cowlicks, like eddies and water-spouts, in inconvenient places. It was never neat and attractive, or even as straight, greasy and uncomplicated as the rock star hair I tried to emulate. In short, my hair never served me; it was not my extension, just dead stuff on top of my head. Maybe that was not such a bad thing because it saved me from missing my hair too much when it started to go. You’re hurt less by what never helped.

Such a matter must seem too trivial to ponder in detail, and I am the first to wish the quality of a man’s hair were not more important to most people than the quality of his mind. And while the cosmos is more profound than a mosquito, a can of Raid will do more good in woods than a telescope. Surely many people have held my hair against me until wrinkles and eye circles shared the weight of negative attention. Conversely, I might have more success with better hair, but I am reluctant to use hair as an excuse.

It would be unfair to my other flaws.

Is Felafel Patriotic After 9/11?

The attack on the World Trade Center prompted me to question many aspects of my life, including my conduct, manner of relating to others, the work I was doing, and even my habits and lifestyle choices. These self-doubts and inquiries, ethical and ontological in nature, imposed themselves on the minutiae of my day. Every decision was fraught with political implications and security considerations, including what and where I would eat for lunch. Casual pleasures hitherto simply chosen and easily enjoyed were now cast in murky suspicion. Whether I should eat falafels in a nearby Middle Eastern fast food joint, for instance, became politicized—a clash between the part of me that separates state and sandwich, and the other, which says you are what you eat—and you don’t want to eat anything that is even symbolically anti-American. I wondered whether enjoying a fat pita filled with deep-fried mashed chickpeas coated with yogurt and hot pepper sauce constituted an act of disloyalty or treason.

Such misgivings led me to a Turkish falafel restaurant in the village. It was a political compromise since I had previously patronized another middle-eastern take-out place that was now off-limits in my mind because of the Lebanon and Syria tourism posters on its walls. Turkey is an American ally so I believed that eating Turkish falafel would be more harmonious with American interests and values. This in itself was a huge step for me and it I needed to work through many issues to take it. For months after 9/11 I had lost my taste for falafels. They had fallen off my personal menu. Finally, I rationalized that what I ate for lunch bore no relation to recent events, and that eschewing one of my favorite lunch foods would only be caving in to terrorism.

But the copper plates engraved with Arabic inscriptions on the wall, that once lent authenticity to the décor, now looked portentous. Their exoticism and strangeness, which had once been such pleasant aids to digestion now hindered my appetite. I started to imagine if the counterman could have tainted my falafel, by spitting in it, for instance.

Patrons entered the restaurant, speaking a middle-eastern tongue. Heretofore, their presence at a falafel restaurant would have reassured me about the quality of fare. Now they made me feel not merely disloyal but endangered. Was it possible to eat the wrong sandwich in the wrong restaurant and disappear? I asked myself if I was taking too great a risk for of my favorite lunch foods, over and beyond the potential damage the deep-fried falafel would do to my cardiovascular system.

But it was not merely a sense of peril that changed the experience of eating the falafel in a middle-eastern restaurant. I had experienced danger when eating in deserted Italian restaurants with immaculate tablecloths, sepia photographs of mustached men, and no apparent business but that which I provided. The strangeness of the décor and language could not keep me away—they added to the flavor as much as the harissa on the table. What had changed was a quality unique to middle-eastern restaurants, a form of brotherhood among the patrons. In a falafel restaurant, you would typically find hungry people of many origins all coming together for hot, spicy food of good quality that is honest, nutritious and delicious. Felafel-eaters, shwarma-tics, baba ghanoushers, and chummus-enthusiasts consume with fervor and enthusiasm and end their meals feeling satisfied. That camaraderie had been lost. Now we were once again strangers, even belligerents, who happened to like the same food, like competing predators around a watering hole. Maybe our mutual enthusiasm for one food posed an ambiguity, an identity problem. Did my love of falafels reveal something subversive about me?

The same mistrust infiltrated other commonplace decisions. A fruit stand where I purchased cherries and bananas was now suspect. Was the vendor perhaps a Muslim who sympathized with terrorists? Did he tithe to their organizations to fund their conspiracies, or was this modest fruit-stand an elaborate front for enemies of the United States? Before, such thinking would have seemed paranoid and absurd—and completely anachronistic in a city like New York, predicated on immigration and diverse people. But the ambiguity of this form of terrorism, its banality, how it creeps into everyday places and mundane activities, and is practiced by apparently normal people in customary clothes, with such innocuous items as shopping bags, has made no second thought absolutely ridiculous.

When something is blown up and obliterated, its residue and dust hang in the atmosphere much longer than we know. The event lingers in our hearts for longer still. For many months I would pass Falafel King, my favorite falafel place on MacDougal Street and not go in. This little restaurant, as narrow as a straw, had the best food of its kind. The sandwiches, built by the equable, young counterman—built because the sandwiches were too large and complex to be merely made—were copious and wholesome, the pitas bulged with fresh, healthy salad and spicy condiment. Your mouth could feel the the cold, heavy lumps of baba ghanoush in the pita, would savor the earthy crunchy goodness of deep-fried chickpeas, and the mint in the tabouleh. There were even large bowls of red, oily harissa on the tables, the hot sauce that performs the internal version of a sauna. I loved this place so much that I had walked a mile from one of my jobs to eat there. I liked it so much that I had even written my own ad for it. It was always delivered in my version of a middle-eastern accent, which sounded suspiciously like Boris Badinov in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon series. It went like this: “Why settle for pizza peasant, when you can be a falafel king?”

For all of these reasons I was sad to walk by Falafel King and not climb its golden stair for lunch. I hoped that the mellow, young counterman who had served me so many fine falafels would not notice my passing. In my heart I knew that he and Felafel King had nothing to do with 9/11 or the emotions that it evoked in me. I was miserable, even embarrassed, about how life had changed for me and everyone. Events had altered my view-point. Nevertheless, I could not deny the change, or be sure that my response to it was invalid. Still, a part of me always believes in dialogue, in making oneself clear, in being honest. And being silent and evasive is just a discreet form of dishonesty. Still, I didn’t know what to tell him, and I imagined that he would be offended if I told him anything. On the other hand, he probably didn’t want me to come in. Somehow, the World Trade Center attack had become for me the subtext to what all middle-eastern people thought of America—I had translated this specific, catastrophic event into a general intention, on which many people would not act, but which they secretly endorsed. I was a walking ambivalence.

Yet, one day I glanced up at the store, and he saw me. I nodded and kept walking, but then turned back. I realized that I was going to have a falafel, needed to have a falafel, not just for my belly, my taste buds, or the comfort the food gave to me, but for my psyche, to regain that one enjoyable routine I had that the events of 9/11 had taken from me. I was going to take the risk that the quiet, young counterman would not poison me, I would hold a more rational belief that his falafel would be as good as it had been a hundred times before. And maybe I wouldn’t have to explain myself.

He gave me his usual salutation, “Hey,” a friendly, low-key statement, that essentially contained a “I know you”, “How are you?”, and “Long time, no see” and placed on pressure on a response.

He made my falafel as I watched, asked if I wanted a hot pepper, which I did, and poured the spiced tea. I sat at a formica table in the back and stared out at the window. The music was on, a wailing voice, with the rush and tumble of Arabian arrangements. On the walls were posters of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. As I expected they would, these innocuous relics of exotic climes that once transported me back in time to my youthful travels were making me nervous. The good-natured counter man had little business, so he walked back to the kitchen area behind a swinging door to bring a case of sodas to the cooler in front. He must have noticed my discomfort because he stopped near my table, and asked if there was something wrong. “No,” I lied.

“That’s a relief. A few days ago a customer was having a little difficulty. You know, chest pains. I thought it was a heart attack. Or heartburn. Either way, it’s not a good thing for a customer to be sick.”

I told him I wasn’t sick, just a little uncomfortable. Ever since 9/11 I had been anxious.

“Yes, I know. Me, too. Business is slow. Not just for me, but everybody. I know how people feel. I feel the same. But nobody believes that. I been here for fifteen years, on this street. But people forget. I understand. Maybe they will remember. I hope so.”

I hoped so, as well. It’s much easier to remember the carnage, the pain, the loss, than the hundreds of good falafels that came before, or to realize that the people you thought were good were as good as you thought they were.

I sat down at a table in the back, watching the door, tucking into the heavy sandwich cradled in my hands, while on alert. I chewed with delight the crusty chickpea balls, the sweet, marinated grape leaves, and crunchy lettuce, drenched in white tahina and red harissa. I sipped the sweet mint tea and scanned the tourism posters from Lebanon, Tunisia, Jordan—all countries that I would never be able to visit. Yet, I was tasting them in a way. As I was taking the last bites of the pita , two Arabic speaking young men came in and chatted with the counterman with voluble good spirits. They ordered and looked back at me. For a moment, my gut constricted and I went on alert, wondering how I would be able to get out of there if I needed to, since there was only one way out, and they were standing before it.. But the customers then turned back to their friend, the counterman, and they continued to talk in their musical dialect with the boisterous, high spirits of men in their early 20s. When he had prepared their sandwiches and they had paid, they shook his hand, gave him a salutation and left.

I could not help smiling at the peaceful resolution of this moment, at its normality. My reaction had been unnecessary. Was I merely lucky? Perhaps. After all, many Mafia rub-outs have occurred in restaurants. Or just maybe a good little restaurant is a little like a sacred place. Yes, this is a place foremost about food, and maybe food trumps hate.

In Rick Seback’s whimsical and informative documentary about sandwiches, the Palestinian-born owner of Sepal, a middle-eastern restaurant in Cambridge, MA, famous for its falafels, said that he has many Jewish customers with whom he often sits and discusses the political situation. He expressed his conviction that sharing good food could be a start toward understanding and peace. Maybe one day we will all find a way out of our post 9/11 dilemmas.