After all of my hand wringing yesterday afternoon, perspective arrived in the evening.  After a patchy, overcast weather all day, a thin stripe of sunshine lit the trees across the pond followed by a pink sky, promising a lovely day today. 

And as I watched the full moon rise after the light faded, my boy mention as he passed me, “I planted a seed in your garden today.”

“You did?”

“Yes.  I planted my nectarine pit in the garden so that it would grow into a tree.”

Never much of a gardener before, I began planting new things each September since 2001 as a way of reminding myself to appreciate where I am now and to invest hope in the coming spring.  The result is a garden that gives me more joy than I ever imagined.  This year’s bulbs sit in a box in the garage waiting to be planted, but it’s good to know something went into the ground on the 11th.  Now, to figure out where he planted it and keep the chipmunks away from it.

Finally, we stumbled on the Science Channel’s Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero and it was gratifying to see something emerging, at last, from the ashes of that day.  No false reality TV drama, just stories and extraordinary images of the new buildings and the memorial and how they are being built.  The series is several hours long and worth every minute.  Thank you, Steven Spielberg.

Now more than ever, it seems we are trying to predict the future and we are still surprised when we are wrong.  With the 24 hour news cycle, smartphones and iPad apps, the media devotes so much time and space to people saying they know what the future holds interspersed with other people trying to say they saw the most recent disaster coming followed by a systematic and relentless assignment of blame.  What is wrong with this picture?  How do we calculate our success rate in preventing catastrophe?  Most of the time the people who saw it coming – if there are any – cannot be found on CNN, Fox or the Huffington Post, that’s for sure.

There was a time when the most we could expect to warn us of disaster was the tornado siren.  What we have now that earlier generations did not is a bombardment of information that gives us the illusion that whatever happens, we should see it coming.   We spent days preparing and watching hurricane Irene blast up the coast only to have her ravage inland rivers - apparently, no one warned Vermont.  All of the tsunami sensors in the Pacific did not dissuade Japan from placing a nuclear power plant on the coast.  And all of those big banks got hoodwinked by the ratings agencies and never noticed all of those bad loans they were underwriting.  It’s no wonder we scratch our heads and wonder how we missed it because as time goes by our mistakes seem ever more stupid and obvious.

Pick a topic – our health, the economy, or the weather – there are any number of solutions to it that are just a click away.  And yet, the flow of disasters almost seem to speed up rather than abating with all of this new knowledge and the ability to communicate it.  If we leave the TV and the internet on, we are fed, ever so smoothly, the myth that we can prevent bad things from happening when in some respects the bad things are perpetuated by us sitting in front of the screen.  And the more preposterous and untenable the theory, the better – we reward the wing nuts:  I watched the movie Network last spring and it could have been a documentary. 

The moment of revelation in youth that people do terrible things for reasons we cannot understand is one we never forget, and a certain part of our lives is indeed devoted to trying to avert the personal disasters we have known in the forms of death, illness, poverty and pain.  Those moments stand juxtaposed with the more collective events for which we don’t feel any personal culpability but then feel compelled to do something about:   My parents had Pearl Harbor as a defining moment (and that came on the heels of the Great Depression), the following generation had the death of President Kennedy (followed by the Viet Nam war and Watergate), and we have this day (followed by two wars and a financial meltdown).  What one generation does in response to its challenges defines the generation that follows, and I don’t pretend to know that that means for my children – I’m not getting into the prediction business.

Many years ago my cousin was dying of cancer, and she removed every newspaper, magazine and television from her home so that she could focus on her art and on helping others (she offered free financial advice to retirees).  I admired her focus but recall thinking that I would never shut myself off from the world the way that she did, even in those circumstances.  Now, as I watch the towers fall yet again, I understand, and yet I watch, hoping to think of something good we can do with my son’s time machine.

The days that followed September 11, 2001, were uniformly sunny and warm as if even the weather stood stock still in the wake of that morning.  And when we walked each morning down to get the paper in those first days following the attacks, the skies were noticeably empty and quiet as every commercial plane in America sat idle somewhere on the tarmac, waiting to hear that the coast was clear.

The skies are quiet now again, I noticed this bright morning as I walked out from under the canopy of trees into the open field at the end of the drive, but now it is the economy that emptied them.  Airplane fares are high and far fewer planes are in the air.  A friend who travels extensively and who finds himself stranded in airports time and again, noted, “Now, very often, you really can’t get there from here.”  The idea of catching the next flight is no longer a matter of hours but sometimes days, even to major destinations.  Luggage that must be scanned and checked requires more time to clear, extending the time required between flights – last spring we ended up renting a car and driving home from New York because 90 minutes would not allow us enough time to make our connection – the next flight home would have been 24 hours later.  It was a three-hour drive - this is why people carry overstuffed carry-on bags and heave them into the overhead compartment.

Fewer planes in the air is not necessarily such a bad thing, but I have to wonder if I will ever stop assessing the collateral damage of that day – whether it distracted our institutions from proper stewardship of our economy, whether it fostered more hate than unity among us, and if my love of a clear September day has been  hijacked permanently.

Fast forward to 2010, when W. comes in and tells me he’s “worried about 2100.”   “You mean that stupid movie about 2012?”,  I ask.  “No, 2100, – look, it’s on YouTube.”  He pulls out the iPod and does a search, his fingers moving like lighting across the tiny keyboard.  He hands it to me and I watch, mouth agape, a commercial for a “documentary” about all the disasters that await the world in 2100 – New York City under water, forests aflame, an apocalypse via CGI.  And in the corner of the screen there is an icon:  ABC News.  The news division is now in the prophecy business, reporting science fiction as hard news.  Never mind that 2100 is farther away than W. thinks it is, his iPod is telling him he should be concerned about it and has stunning visuals to reinforce this myth of fiction presented as fact.

My memories of the nightly news from toddlerhood identify me as a media hound from way back, and I learned early to question the source of any story, but it’s becoming so clear to me that the sheer number of sources and the advances in visual technology make it so much harder for kids to decide whether what they are hearing and seeing  is worthy of their attention.  When A. did a research paper recently on health care, it was astounding how difficult it was to find hard information that was not subject to spin or propaganda – and the crazier the rhetoric, the sexier the site was.  Those graphically austere government sites with all the real documents on them are not nearly as fun to peruse as the Daily Kos and the Drudge Report.  And even some of the sites with more sober graphics were selling an angle.  It was hard for both of us to determine whether a source was reputable.

But even though I am complaining I am grateful that there are so many sources of information, from caller ID to Facebook, because if we take the time to identify good sources, we can access them at any time and we can teach our children about critical thinking in a concrete, hands-on way.  The hardest part is knowing when to turn it off.   When my cousin D. was dying of cancer, she quit her lucrative job, got rid of her TV, cancelled her newspapers, and devoted her time to painting, sewing, and helping local seniors with their finances and taxes.  I did not know her well earlier in her life, but those last few years I did know her to be one of the most joyful, peaceful people I have ever met.  I don’t have the fortitude – or the desire – to unplug completely like she did, but I use her example as a constant reminder that we need to work hard keep our eyes and minds firmly on this side of the looking glass.

You can wade through the earlier posts or wait for what will emerge in 2010 – but thanks all the same for stopping by.  Heartfelt thanks, also, to everyone who encouraged me to start LettersHead and who have helped along the way – you know who you are and you are all lovely. 

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.  We are humbled to have so much and hopeful that the future will bring joy and peace to all who seek it.

Things I finally began to notice that are gone or on their way out (a sure sign of a mid life crisis in full bloom):

• Phone booths
• Drive-up bank tellers with people behind the window
• Tiny packages of Life Savers (that the drive-up tellers used to give out)
• Boom boxes
• Photo booths that develop camera film
• Full service gas stations
• Postage stamps
• Hand-written letters (I know, that’s why I’m here)
• The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature (paper version)
• Aprons that only cover from the waist down
• Instamatic cameras
• Flash bulbs
• Knee socks
• Rice pudding (wishful thinking)
• TV dinners with compartments for each kind of food
• Miracle Whip (more wishful thinking)
• Cassette players
• Swizzle sticks that look like swords
• Sanka
• Seven-digit phone numbers
• Jiffy Pop
• White shoes (they’ll be back)
• Ash trays
• Rotary phones
• Clip-on earrings