What Did We Do in the War, Daddy?

It's been six weeks now. I didn't think I would be writing about September 11 again, a fourth installment of this march through the altered world to the new normal, thence to whatever lay beyond — normalcy, in the dreaming. But I realize that New York is not back to normal, nothing like it, and so I think I might have another go at this — a fourth shot — and perhaps get back to sports next week. I believe what I'm doing is trying to build a document for my kids, ages 3, 1 and 1, to possess down the road, perhaps ten years hence. And besides, re. the sports: I think I need a World Series, nothing less, to stimulate those juices. It's very nice that Dale Jr. won another auto race and that Doug Flutie's doing so well, but I've got nothing more to say about that, really. As for the Yankees. . . .

[an error occurred while processing this directive]Well, actually, as for the Yankees — it's interesting about the Yankees. My feeling about the Yankees perhaps indicates just how abnormal the world still is here in New York. Due diligence and full disclosure: I arrived in New York City, for better or worse, on January 2, 1980 and have, all this time — lo these 22 years — fed and nurtured a healthy hatred of the Yankees. I maintained a stolid if stupid dedication to the Red Sox, going so far as to join a behind-enemy-lines club, the BLOHARDS (Benevolent Loyal Order of Honorable and Ancient Red Sox Diehard Sufferers of New York). The considerable success of the during my time in New York only made me loathe them more.

It was the fifth game against Oakland, so this proves it didn't come easy. When the Yanks went down two games to naught I might have thought to myself, "That's too bad. They've had a great run." But that was it. I think the anthrax had started coming in the mail by then, and certainly the bombing had started in Afghanistan. I was busy trying to convince my dear old mother in Massachusetts that Rockefeller Center was a huge place, at least a mile long, and that the TIME offices were nowhere near NBC's. My brother works for the postal service; Mom had enough to worry about. Anyway, the point I was trying to make, when the Yankees won game three against the A's and then game four, I still didn't want them to win the series.

But then, with game five, I did. If I remember correctly, it happened around the fourth or fifth inning. By the seventh I desperately wanted them to win it. And, as we know, they did. Then I rooted for them through the whole just-concluded series against the mighty Mariners. I didn't buy a ball cap or anything, but I rooted for the Yanks, even if I couldn't suck it up enough to cheer for that big lug Clemens. And, today, I'm glad they're in the Series a fourth straight year, and I'm backing them against the Diamondbacks. Over here, over there, action everywhere. In the Arizona desert. In the hills outside Kabul. Go Yankees, all.

Next spring, I dearly hope, I am a Bosox fan again. If I am not, the world is still on its head, and New York is still in bad, bad shape.

That's what it's all about, of course: The Yankees winning would be good for the city, and anything that's good for the city right now is worthy of our support. I'm going to have lunch at Odeon tomorrow, a few blocks from Ground Zero. God help me, I may buy the new Paul McCartney CD. We do all these little things, and maybe they'll add up. Maybe.

We still can't behave the way we did before; it remains unacceptable. The other morning I met a friend on the train platform and he greeted me urgently with "Did you hear what happened?" You can't do that, these days. Immediately I wondered if the Clintons' house had been attacked in Chappaqua, or if there were an anthrax outbreak in Katona. It turned out he had news of someone known to us who was engaged in an extramarital affair. Spectacular information, to be sure, but you still can't be alarmist in your lead-in. Not yet.

When I got to my office I already had a voicemail: "Hi. Me. Call me." I phoned my wife and she told me she had read in the Patent Trader that Mr. Johnson had died. I didn't know him well, but knew him well enough to know he was a sweet man and something like the Lord of the Neighborhood. He sometimes saw me walking to the train station and offered me a ride. I always accepted, even on a fine day, because Mr. Johnson represented five minutes of engaging company as he drove us down the hill into Mt. Kisco where, I presumed, he was going for his morning coffee.

"More sad news," I said to Luci, just to say something.

"Yes," she agreed. "Nothing but."

"Well, the kids are good."

Our children have remained happy and healthy throughout the autumn, and we've continuously come back to them — the fact of them — as the only available tonic. But the other night Luci and I, who are not these kind of people and who have never said such things before, had this conversation:

"It does make you wonder."

"What?"

"Well, what kind of world we've brought these kids into. What kind of world they're going to end up with. What the world's going to be like ten years down the road.

"But we're not those kind of people — we don't ask those kinds of questions. And besides, I'm sure people ask that sort of stuff whenever times are bad. Then things change."

"I'm sure you're right. But this is so . . . . strange."

It is. The new world is jittery but, more, it's just plain strange: a world filled with mourning and funerals and bizarre e-mails and a CNN screen that never doesn't feature its BREAKING NEWS frame. Coming to work yesterday morning, I was stopped for ten minutes, again, in trying to cross Fifth Avenue. Not a checkpoint. Another police officer's funeral — or memorial Mass — at St. Pat's. It's been about two-to-one firemen, and about three days in five at 9 a.m., to have a pause, the lights flashing, the Force or the Department at attention, a band of pipers. The tourists and businessfolk are respectful. I always doff my hat as the cortege passes. It is extravagantly sad, and always a reminder, if perhaps you napped on the train or knocked off a chapter of the potboiler and, somehow, escaped for a moment. The procession snaps you back to grim reality. Finally you are allowed to cross the street, and the sweet and sour sound of the bagpipes drift in the air as you walk through Rock Center — where, having been awakened by the funeral, you dwell on the lurking anthrax.

The e-mails: Let me tell you about two. My brother-in-law is an alarmist; he spends far too much time on the 'Net, reading crazy stuff. So a couple weeks ago Scott forwards to me something that he's found about the Florida guy who went to one of the Carolinas and got anthrax. Scott's comment: "Sure looks like bioterrorism to me." My silent response: "Nutty Scott."

Then last week, there's something sent to the staff here by one of the big bosses. I mean, he's one of the big, big bosses. Someone who can call Steve Case at home. It was a lovely, eloquent e-mail. The big, big boss wanted to share with us all something he had read the previous weekend, a passage from C.S. Lewis that he had found comforting. The writing was, indeed, worth sharing: "I think it is important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.

"We are mistaken when we compare war with 'normal life'. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward.

"Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache: it is our nature."

I was glad that the big boss had shared this, and it did help — somewhat. But it was also disquieting. First, it was an e-mail from a boss that wasn't about the United Way or someone's promotion or the blood drive. That's unsettling, in and of itself. And second, while it put the current situation in some perspective it also hammered home a point some of us were avoiding: We are at war. Serious war.

And it's not only over there, it's over here. I had my anthrax dream the other night. It was different than most people's anthrax dreams. It was, in fact, quite lovely. The background to the dream is this: We own six acres of junk land way, way up in New Hampshire, north of two of the three big notches. The land is, essentially, a bunch of trees off Langway Drive, a lane which would be flattered if you called it a dirt road. The parcels up and down the drive are thoroughly undeveloped. No one lives there and no one will, not anytime soon. I bought the land as a notion twenty years ago — a camp? a cabin? — and now I'm stuck with it.

In my dream it is a lovely blue-sky day and Luci, the kids and I arrive in our station wagon on Langway Road, where our spanking new split-level sits glistening amidst a Levittown of variously colored little houses. What is, in real life, impenetrable forest has been transformed into the pristine neighborhood of Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands." In the dream Luci and I don't discuss why we are here, why we and all these other shiny happy people have turned far northern New Hampshire into heaven on earth. But upon awaking in Westchester County, where the down-the-road Indian Point nuclear power plant could be turned into a dirty bomb by a hijacked plane, where a score of local firefighters are no longer among us thanks to their heroic efforts on September 11, where an equal number of bankers and brokers are also dead, where my morning commute will feature bagpipes and a sympathetic glance up at the NBC studios — upon awaking, I know what the dream is about.

It was about escaping, escaping with the kids. When Tom Brokaw's assistant became exposed to anthrax, Brokaw famously said at the end of his newscast, "This is so unfair and so outrageous and so maddening, it's beyond my ability to express it in socially acceptable terms." I watched that and felt no sympathy for the man. My immediate reaction was: "Oh, so now it's personal." Five thousand and more had been killed with no similar outrage by the anchor, but this one had hit home.

I needed to analyze this reaction of mine, since I myself lost no one near and dear in the events of September 11. What had personalized it for me?

The kids. Fear for the kids. They're three, one and one and I really do wonder what's in store for them. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, there's no end to the madness. But beyond Lewis and despite whatever solace there might be in his solid argument, the newest madness seems ever more mad: as mad as Hitler, as mad as mad can be. Any kind of general world madness involves the children, whose world starts tomorrow.

I envision a conversation with Caroline, Jack and Mary Grace on the front porch of our home — the colonial in Westchester, not the ranch in New Hampshire — ten years hence. Caroline, who's nearly 14, leads the discussion (as she already does today): "Dad, those things you gave me to read were totally useless for my report on the World Trade Center. Like, totally."

"Well, Sweetie [will she still be Sweetie?], those were more about what we were feeling at the time. Not so much about what had happened."

"Can I read them, Dad?" asks Jack.

I consider. "Sure," I say. "But remember, it was a funny time. It was a strange time."

"Strange?" asks Mary Grace.

"Very. Life was very different. You didn't have to buy water a store, for instance. You could, if you wanted, or it would come right into your house. When Caroline went to Jennie's school, over at the church, she carried a backpack but she didn't have to put the mask in it. New York City didn't have soldiers, just policemen. All of that stuff was just starting to change. We were just heading into war."

"Were we scared?"

"You weren't, you were too young. Your mother and I were a little scared. Worried for you. Worried what might happen to you if something happened to one of us."

"Dad?" Caroline asks.

"Yes."

"Back then, did they know the war would last this long?"

— "Robert Sullivan just finished editing a LIFE book on the events of September 11 and their aftermath to be published in November"