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I had not planned on writing about the ten year anniversary of the tragedy that befell our nation on September 11, 2001, but as I was out picking strawberries on this beautiful fall day I couldn’t help but revisit those days in my mind. September 11th was my daughter’s first day of kindergarten and in our stunned state we did our best to be excited with her. Inside though, we were horrified and on edge, not knowing if the attacks were over or if the terror was just beginning.

That afternoon I sat outside on the deck of a coffee shop with my sister. Usually on a sunny, calm afternoon Beluga Lake is busy with float plane traffic and the scheduled flights of the commuter planes taking off and landing within earshot of downtown. The quiet of that day seemed magnified. The horror of what it meant to the people in the twin towers, or on flight 93 hovered on the edges of our conversation, but it was too big to comprehend in that moment. It would take a while for the magnitude of it all to sink in.

Just a couple days after planes started to fly again I took a trip to Las Vegas to meet up with some family members for a mini-reunion. Las Vegas had never been a destination place for me, and it seemed like the wrong place to be going at such a time, but I had the tickets and it had been a long time since I’d seen my family, so I went. I was stunned at the sheer number of people there, although my sisters who had been there before assured me that it was quiet in comparison to their past visits. I was also stunned by the shops in all directions. Every single one had a display of United States flag paraphernalia for sale, from stars and stripes sun visors to Bin Laden Wanted Dead or Alive t-shirts. I was impressed and appalled at how quickly the marketers were in action, turning a national tragedy into an excuse to buy trinkets.

Within the first hour of all of us meeting up at the Luxor hotel and casino someone in our group bought a US flag lapel pin for each one of us. I couldn’t wear mine. At the time I couldn’t even articulate why it felt like the wrong thing for me to do. All I knew was that it felt too easy. I was in mourning and to me the lapel pin wasn’t a sign of mourning. It would have made more sense for me to wear black, or better yet be at home with my husband and children, holding them close.

Las Vegas isn’t my kind of place, so even if tragedy hadn’t just struck our country there’s a good chance that I would have been wandering around in a daze. But the noise, the gambling, the shopping, it all felt misguided. I fear that I wasn’t good company for those few days.

What I kept waiting for, and never got, was for someone to suggest to the United States citizens that we band together for the good of our country, not by consuming more, not by spending more money, but by cutting back. There was a moment when that message would have been received. Great strides could have been made on making our country energy independent or better yet on reducing our reliance on fossil fuels altogether.

All that happened on that day ten years ago still fills me with sadness. In addition to that though, I’m filled with sadness by much of what has happened (or not happened) since then. The lives that were lost on that day should never be forgotten. Neither should the lives of the Iraqi and Afghani civilians who have died in the aftermath. Who pays them tribute? Their lives are no less valuable that those of the American’s who died on September 11, 2001, or less valuable than those of our service members who have died fighting for the country they love.

The issues and emotions surrounding September 11^th are infinitely complicated. They cannot be summed up with lapel pins or a special Facebook status. And I have to wonder, are we safer than we were on September 1^st, 2001? Have the wars and the lives lost brought any resolution? Will they ever? Wouldn’t our money and resources be better spent on making our country healthier and more self-reliant than we’ve ever been before? Or, is that even the goal?

 

Thanks to Harold Camping, an eighty-nine year old Christian radio talk show host, the rapture was on everyone’s radar this past week. I noticed it mentioned in casual conversations. It was written about in blogs and newspapers around the country. On Facebook I was invited to both the post-rapture party and the post-rapture looting.

When I first heard of Camping’s prediction that the rapture would happen on Saturday I just laughed it off. What a wacko, I thought, thinking he can predict something that clearly is supposed to “come like a thief in the night” and take everyone off guard. Then I thought, wait a minute, I don’t even believe in the rapture anymore. I think it’s a bunch of bunk. I think it’s a ridiculous idea that goes against the laws of nature. I don’t think it’s going to happen at all, regardless of whether the rapture, in all of its hypothetical glory, is predicted or a total surprise.

If I say I don’t believe in it, and I don’t, then why does the mention of the rapture still fill me with a sense of dread like nothing else? Why do I have a hard time joining in the mocking and ridicule of the notion that all the true believers will be carried off to heaven while the rest of us, the non-believers, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Jews, the Pagans and anyone else who doesn’t make the cut, get left behind?

There are a few reasons why all of this rapture talk disturbs me more than it amuses me. First of all, it draws a clear line of distinction between groups of people. There are those who believe in the rapture and those who do not. As I’ve already mentioned, I’m not a rapture believer, but lots of people that I love are, and they believe, seemingly without a doubt, that there will be a moment when the great separation will occur. And according to their standards I won’t make the cut. Nothing feels good about that.

Another reason all of this rapture mania makes me uncomfortable is that I spent a lot of years of my life thinking that at any moment my family could be whisked away. If I had been good; no lying, no swearing, no doubting the Word of God, then I could be included. But if I lied, say, about eating all of the leftover chocolate cake, or if I wondered secretly whether Jesus really did come back to life after three days of being dead, then I might get left behind in which case I’d be left alone to fend for myself in a hostile world. That’s enough to make a young girl feel a little jumpy, a little worried, a little confused. And afraid, nearly all the time.

So all of this rapture talk hits me on a personal level. It reminds me of the uncertainty of my childhood. I mean, it’s hard to really grow as a person when you’re scared all the time. It also reminds me that there are a lot of people looking forward to being swept away from all of this hardship here on earth. In that regard, belief in the rapture is the perfect antidote to the hopelessness that is sometimes felt when big things are beyond our control. –We don’t have to worry ourselves with these wars, they’re all a part of the plan.– or – This world is just our temporary home, any damage we might cause won’t matter in the long run.–

So I guess I would be able to laugh about all of the rapture talk if not so many people (people who vote, people who get elected) believed in it. To them it’s more real and of bigger concern than climate change, or crippling inequality, or social justice. And in that regard, the idea of the rapture scares me as much now as it did when I was a little girl.

It started a couple of weeks ago when my mom posted on Facebook a letter she’d found while she was going through her mother’s belongings.  The letter was written on June 30, 1918 to Cora Edwards, my great grandmother.  Her brother Lonnie wrote it to her while he was stationed in France during World War I.

The letter was poignant on many levels with its description of the French countryside and the mention of how almost all the women he’d seen in France and England wore mourning clothing.  And Lonnie was so eager to hear news from home.  He wrote, “It is very little news I have from home- the States, so wish you would write me as often as you have time even tho you may not hear from me very often.  Send all the news paper clippings of interest you can.”  At the end of the letter he went on to say, “I have received only three letters since I’ve been here.  It was 41 days before I received any mail.  Lots of it must have been lost.”

After reading the letter I commented to my mom (via Facebook) that it must have been so exciting to get letters from overseas back then, and that although facebook and email are great for staying in touch these days, there is something nice about a handwritten letter of depth.  I made this comment realizing that it had been ages since I’d actually taken the time to hand-write a long, newsy, rambling letter to anyone.

The idea of writing someone a “real” letter stuck with me.  I thought of my friend Ellen from my college days in Missoula and decided I would put her on the top of my list of people to write.  We haven’t stayed current with each other’s lives and she is an obvious choice because she doesn’t use facebook and I don’t have her email address.

Then I got a great surprise last Friday.  Dean’s Aunt Kathy (well my aunt too, for the past twenty years) had seen the comment I left on my mom’s Facebook page, and so she wrote me a letter.  A beautiful letter telling me about Dean’s father, a man I was never able to meet.  I knew he had been a businessman and a pilot, but I never would have known that he wrote poetry if not for Kathy’s letter.

So last Sunday morning, while the house was still quiet, and with a cup of freshly brewed coffee, I sat down to write two letters, the first to Kathy, the second to Ellen.

Something about hand-writing the letters felt very different than pressing buttons on a keyboard.  It felt more personal and less business-like.  I wrote without the benefits of spell-check (which made me have to stop and think on more than one occasion) and I had to use the old-fashioned method of crossing out mistakes rather than just hitting backspace.  My handwriting changed too, sometimes tidy and small if I was being particularly thoughtful, sometimes bigger and more sloppy if I was writing quickly or getting caught up in an idea.  I couldn’t make it all uniform by choosing a font style or size.

By far the best part of writing those two letters though was the feelings and memories I conjured up during the process.  While writing Kathy’s letter it felt like she was there with me.  I remembered how it felt to sit across from her in her kitchen when our family spent Christmas at her house several years ago.  I could almost hear her voice.  While writing to Ellen I remembered the long walks we used to take around the streets of Missoula.  For those few moments it felt like we were making our way through the University district, talking non-stop the entire time.

All of this thinking about reading and writing letters also reminded me of the letters I used to get from my mom when I was a little girl.  For most of the year I only got to be with her every other weekend, but between visits she would always write a letter.  I would read them repeatedly throughout the week, and each time they made me feel close to her, even though we were three towns apart.  Those letters mattered; they gave me something tangible to hold on to when I missed her.

I don’t see myself giving up Facebook or email, but I realize that hand-written, personal letters convey a sentiment that’s often missing in technology.  So thanks Aunt Kathy for the hand-written letter.  Thanks also to my grandmother, Marie Acree, for holding on to Great-Uncle Lonnie’s letter for all those years.  And thanks Mom, for posting the historical letter on Facebook.   It made me appreciate that I can check my friends’ and family’s  status, even “chat” with them from time to time.  But it also made me remember how nice it is to find a real ink-on-paper-stuffed-in-an-envelope-sealed-with-a-stamp-letter in the mailbox.  I intend to write more of them.

Overall I’m the sort of person that does my best to keep as many people agreeing with me as possible.  In this blog I’ve written about music festivals, trips to the post office; things that most people, regardless of their personal beliefs, can relate to in some way.  But lately I’ve been having a hard time coming up with fluffy subjects to write about.  This is not surprising given what is in the news these days, with the uprisings in the Middle East, the natural disasters in Japan, and the not-so-natural one that is unfolding at their nuclear power plants.  Then there is our own country’s financial crisis and the fact that the tundra is thawing and the polar ice cap is melting at an alarming rate.  While the things within my own household are going along just fine, I am feeling the weight of the bigger things that feel beyond my control.  Some days I want to ignore the news completely because the knowledge one gains from becoming informed is painful.  And pain is to be avoided at all costs, right?

Well I’m starting to think that feeling a little pain is in order.  A few years ago I injured my back in a car accident.  The doctor cautioned me about numbing the pain too much.  If you can’t feel the pain, it’s easy to reinjure yourself, he told me, and it can make things worse.   And he was right.  On a few occasions I pushed it too far and paid for it the next day.

Maybe as a culture we’re taking too many pain killers; they come in so many different forms these days.  All of our distractions and obsessions can keep us from facing some pretty painful realities about what we’re doing to our planet, and consequently the people who live on it.  Watching the nuclear crisis unfold in Japan is like someone pulling off a Band Aid to expose a festering wound that we’ve numbed and covered up for too long.  Now that it’s exposed we can see that we shouldn’t have built nuclear power plants in one of the most seismically active regions in the world. It seems so obvious in retrospect. And the reality of what it could mean is beyond painful, it’s horrific.

And what other things are we choosing not to notice?  They are too numerous to count, and it’s overwhelming to start tallying them up.  And yet, how are these problems going to go away if we ignore them?  The answer is that they aren’t going to go away at all.  Nobody is going to rescue us from the damage we’re doing, not God, not the aliens, probably not a giant asteroid hitting the earth.  The problems we’ve created are only going to get worse unless we start paying attention, and taking action.  We can start by speaking up, questioning the system that allows corporations to degrade our planet and by demanding that human health and safety take priority over money.  We can start by educating ourselves about some of the things we’d like to ignore.  Even if means going outside of what makes us comfortable.  Even if it hurts.

Getting your driver’s license on your sixteenth birthday was a rite of passage when I was a teenager.   I’m sure it still is for most of the United States, especially in rural towns where public transportation isn’t an option, but here in Homer it’s not uncommon for kids to wait a while before they get their license.  Some of them don’t bother until they’re about to graduate from high school and they realize they won’t always have their parents to drive them around.

My son waited until he was seventeen before he got his driver’s permit, which meant he had to wait another six months to get his license.  And here in Alaska we have “provisional” licenses, (thank God!) which means that kids can’t drive their friends around until they’ve been licensed for six months.

We were a three car family for a while.  Dean and I each have one that gets decent gas mileage, and then we had a Toyota 4-runner that we use for things like hauling the boat and getting firewood etc.  When our son got his driver’s license we let him use the 4-runner.   We thought it would be a good first vehicle for him; it’s pretty much bomb proof and it guzzles gas like you wouldn’t believe, which we thought would teach him about conservation.  Our idea was that if you can only afford to fill it up once a month or so, you learn to carpool and not partake in lots of frivolous driving around.  Our plan was working pretty well until the 4-runner died a couple of weeks ago.

It’s been a bit of a transition going backwards like that.  Our son, who finally got a job in order to support his driving habit, was loving his freedom, even if he did have to parcel it out.   And we were getting pretty fond of it as well.  When we no longer had to chauffer him around we found extra hours in our week.  With offers to pitch in a few bucks for gas we’d send him on errands to pick up his sister or a few groceries.  We no longer had to make late night runs to town to retrieve him from his girlfriend’s house.  It was nice while it lasted.

When you’re a driving adult it’s easy to take the freedom it brings for granted.  I certainly appreciate not having to ask for a ride every time I want to go somewhere.  Our son has adjusted pretty well to this step backwards, partly because it’s summer and he can bike a little, and partly because we let him borrow one of our other cars now and then.  And he knows it’s a temporary thing.  He’s young and can save his money for a car and soon enough he’ll be back in wheels of his own.

On the other end of the driving spectrum is my Granddad.   I don’t know how old he was when he first got his driver’s license, but last week at age 93 he finally had to give it up.  I saw him about a month ago and the thought of him driving was pretty terrifying.  He had trouble staying awake for very long and he moved very slowly.  Just getting up from his chair in the living room and walking the 15 feet to the kitchen table seemed to take an eternity and it looked like he could topple over at any moment.

His driving had been a concern of ours, especially my mother’s, for the past couple of years.  She and my step-dad have been the ones who have checked in on my grandparents, (who at 90 and 93 years old still live on their own), every chance they get, and have constantly tried to assess where and when to assert their help.  Respecting their desire to remain independent has not been easy.  They have ever so slowly slipped into that stage of their lives where independence isn’t always the safest option.  For example, on January 1^st my granddad took my grandmother to her weekly hair appointment, dropped her off and drove back home, never realizing that the hair salon was closed for the New Year’s holiday.  My grandmother had to teeter across a busy intersection to get to a grocery store where she called home and asked my granddad to come pick her up.  When he answered the phone he couldn’t hear anything, so he hung up.  Eventually she got a ride with a cab, but when she returned home my granddad had no recollection of ever dropping her off in the first place.   Worrisome stuff, to put it mildly.

Well last Sunday when my granddad was driving home from church he rear-ended someone.  I don’t know the details of the accident but I do know that nobody was injured.   I can only imagine the scene with my very old, very slow-moving grandfather getting out of the car to assess the damage.  He used to be a great auto-body repairman and I would bet that before he realized that the accident would end his driving career he was thinking about how to make the cars look new again.

I haven’t heard how my granddad is dealing with the fact that he can no longer drive.   Even though the roads are safer without him behind the steering wheel, it must be a frustrating loss of freedom.   The good news is that he’s forgetful, so maybe he won’t remember how he lost his driver’s license.  Maybe his short-term memory will fail him in a beneficial way and the after-church, rear-ending incident will fade away leaving space for the memories of all the road trips of his past.  And my mom must be relieved.  There are plenty of things for her to worry about with her aged parents, but at least Granddad driving is no longer one of them.