We Gather Together

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Much of this public conversation is hosted in New York and Washington, two cities with deep wounds and abiding fears. But the private conversation too has changed--about our families and faith and finances, about how long it will take to get back to normal and whether that is even possible. Will we have to reintroduce ourselves, even to the people who have known us the longest? Hello, I used to be highly competent and deeply cynical, but the edge has flaked off and I can barely make it out the door some mornings. Hello, remember when I was a pacifist? I believe in war now. Excuse me, I refuse to spend my life putting a gas mask in my briefcase and my mail in the microwave. Yes, I know you now go to Mass every morning, but I don't know what I believe anymore, so don't ask me to say grace. Hey, Dad? Can we start over?

HOMEWARD BOUND

We've known for weeks that this Thanksgiving would be like no other. It's not just that more of us will drive instead of fly, or take in strays who can't make it home, or carve out a few hours to help in a soup kitchen, or stop in for an extra church service, though all these are likely. We are aware, as if we were truly all one household, of the families who will face an empty chair at the table, the little boys sitting up straighter than last year, their father now gone, the touch football in the afternoon played with uncles who know they are no substitute. We feel for the families of soldiers and police and fire fighters who can't go off duty, off alert. But since most families were not touched so directly by the attacks of Sept. 11, the impact has been absorbed day by day, one fretful adjustment at a time.

"I don't think anywhere in the country there will be a conversation going on without the change in people's lives being a topic," says Paul Ohrt, a Los Angeles accountant who took a job in New York City last year, even though it meant moving away from his family for 18 months. After Sept. 11, he told his bosses he was done with bicoastal living; he plans to be back home in Los Angeles by Thanksgiving, thereby joining the chorus of people who talk about the wake-up call, the rearrangement of priorities, the growing importance of family, the shrinking importance of work, money, stuff. "They can offer me anything anywhere, and I wouldn't take it," says Ohrt of his bosses. "It's not worth being away from the family."

In a stressful time it's a powerful tug, the urge that pulls us home; but many of us had set out even before Sept. 11. Both in private conversation and in popular culture (see ARTS & MEDIA), you could sense a change in the domestic weather: family dysfunction is now taken for granted, so the pressing question is what to do about it, and the prevailing answer is, Just get over it. As the parents of the baby boomers aged and began to pass away, the generation that once defined itself by rejecting its parents and all they stood for have found themselves wanting to go home again, realizing now they should hold their parents close, because the world is a scary and confusing place without them.