I haven’t worked out a coherent essay for today; most of the things on my mind now don’t hang together very well. It’s funny, the things that come to mind at times like these — “funny” peculiar, primarily — the things that surface and puncture the surreal malaise. (Yipes. Mixed metaphor, table for one.)

I phoned my dad late last week, to speak with him about a couple of mundane financial things. I could have just emailed him, of course, and neither of us had anything new to report, but I wanted to hear his voice. We rambled on about nothing much for a few minutes before the subject turned to American flags. We used to have one that we’d fly on the Fourth of July every year (and then usually forget to take down until November-ish), on a rusty pole that fitted into a pole housing on the roof outside my parents’ bedroom, but Dad didn’t know what had become of it.

“I guess we threw it away.”
“Can you — do that? Throw a flag away?”
“Well, we did, apparently.”
“I know, I know, but I thought American flags were like churches — like, you have to have them decommissioned or something.”
“I think that’s only if they’ve flown in battle. You fold them up and burn them, I believe.”
“Burn them? You can do that?”
“It’s not a saint’s relic, Sarah.”
“I know. I just thought there were, like, rules about proper disposal of an American flag.”

Then Dad mentioned that the temperature had taken a sharp dip the night before, and when he’d gone into the closet to get a blanket for Ma, he’d found Grandma’s American flag blanket. A lot of Grandma’s things wound up at my parents’ house after she died, but I’d forgotten the blanket. Grandma loved flag stuff, and one year for her birthday, Ma and Dad got her an American flag throw for her couch. There’s a wonderful photograph of her — one of the last ones taken before she got sick — sitting in our kitchen, wrapped in her flag blanket even though it’s May and quite warm, eating a banana. (Any Buntings reading today’s entry just got to the part about the banana and chuckled, “Of course she’s eating a banana,” because to say that Grandma’s eating a banana in the picture is like saying that Grandma’s breathing in the picture. My grandmother loved a good banana, still a little green at the ends. Somehow, though, she’d got to the age of seventy without ever sticking the Chiquita sticker on her cheek, which forced me to bully her into putting one on like my friends and I did at school, and she sputtered, “Oh, Sarah, that’s silly,” but she did it, and then she couldn’t stop laughing. “Look at me, an old woman wearing a banana sticker. Such silliness, Sarah! Hee hee hee.” Later that day, she dozed off in front of Days Of Our Lives, still festooned with the Chiquita sticker. I wish I’d thought to take a picture of that.)

Anyway. In the photograph, Grandma’s laughing, the way she always laughed, helplessly with her eyes screwed shut, when my dad and my uncles used to tease her, and whenever I see it, I can still hear her protesting to my father. “Oh, now, David, don’t take a picture — I’ve got a banana! It’s silly!”

A good sport, my Grandma — waded cheerfully into a lot of “silliness” over the years to make her children and grandchildren happy. I miss her still, sometimes; things happen in my life and in the life of the family that I wish she could see, or that I could tell her about in the letters I used to write to her. Of course, it’s just as well that she didn’t see certain things, like my Penthouse gig or the current tattoo-to-grandchild ratio, but I don’t think I’d ever thought to myself, “It’s a good thing Grandma didn’t live to know about this.” Not until Tuesday, when I thought it for the first time. Tuesday would have broken her heart. Tuesday has broken everyone’s heart.

I didn’t mention it to Dad the other day, but as I watched the prayer service at the National Cathedral on TV, I thought of him. When the choir and the congregation sang “The Battle Hymn Of The Republic,” it reminded me of when I couldn’t get to sleep as a little girl and Dad would come sing to me. For reasons that remain obscure — maybe he didn’t know the words to any other “rated-G” songs? — Dad always busted out “The Battle Hymn Of The Republic” to lull me into slumber. After singing a couple of verses, he’d tell me not to worry, that resting is just as good as sleeping, and leave the room, and then I’d lie there, puzzling over the grapes of wrath. I knew what “wrath” meant, more or less, but I didn’t understand how the grapes factored in; I couldn’t stop picturing a bunch of grapes with menacing little faces, all jostling and bitching at each other.

So I sat there at my desk on Friday, staring absently at the TV and the shots of the former Presidents singing along, thinking sort of idly that I’d like to see some credible evidence of Dick Cheney’s continued existence because nobody’s actually seen him in days now, and along came the line about trampling through the vineyard where the grapes of wrath are stored, and in the middle of a very serious tribute to the United States and our fallen dead, I had a vision of a grape kitted out Rambo-style with a teeny little purple headband and a teeny little purple machine gun, bellowing, “Trample THIS, mothafucka!” And then I started giggling.

And then I received a complimentary upgrade from a seat to an entire table in Hell.

After I posted my last essay, a reader sent me an email that included this:

One of the big things that has been going around where I am is the importance of everybody using their individual talents in order to cope, and make things a little easier for themselves and others. As an aspiring writer my self I think it is wonderful and admirable that you can use your craft in order to help people, to get a message across, but most importantly to be able to create art out of such a tragedy.

Well. It’s a lovely compliment, but — “help people”? I don’t know that I do that. I don’t know that I would call last Friday’s piece “art.” I don’t even know why I wrote it, really — in retrospect, it seems terribly arrogant of me to assume that anyone would care about one woman’s experience, one woman fortunate enough to lose no one, one woman who got out with her life and didn’t get too dusty in the process. I saw it, and then I wrote about it, because that’s all I know how to do.

Okay, let’s try it from a different angle. As I walked uptown on Tuesday, I tried to freeze everything in my head, to fix it in mental amber somehow, and as I did that, a little ticker ran underneath my thoughts which read, “Sarah is a fucked-up sociopath, because she’s just seen a one-hundred-and-ten-story building collapse, and what is she doing? She’s not crying, or running back towards the crash site to offer help, ohhhh no. She’s rehearsing descriptions of what she just saw for Tomato Nation, because she has no feelings and everything’s about her, and the anti-matter black hole of her own self-absorption probably caused the towers to buckle in the first place. Stay tuned for continuing coverage of Sarah: Writer, Editor, Deplorable Human Being.” I mean, yeah, everyone deals with it in different ways blah blah blah in shock not thinking clearly blah blah blah the mind returns to familiar terrain blah blah blah fishcakes, but I witnessed this tragedy and immediately started processing it as column fodder.

I’ve gotten many, many emails in the last few days, thanking me for my piece, expressing relief that I made it out alive, praising my writing, offering prayers for me and for my city. I appreciate each and every one, and I also appreciate them for their sheer number — that so many people, who naturally have other things on their minds these days, have taken the time to write to me, include me in their prayers, just check me okay. It’s indescribably touching. I mean, I babble on about the cats and the stupid elevator in my building and the horrors of diaphragm fittings, and I boss people around and I try to get a few laughs; it’s not exactly Paris in the twenties over here, creatively speaking. But then a horrible tragedy befalls the city, and the US, and the world, and I discover that, incredibly, all these people from all over the world care what’s become of me (and the cats). That just floors me — so many electronic hugs and pats from people that, by and large, I’ve never met.

And yet I feel like a fraud. Sure, writing about the attacks, recording them, has value in its way. But that’s all I do — write, smoke, think about boys. How does that help anyone? How does that bring anyone back? How can that pass for comfort at a time like this?

Sunday the ninth, driving down to New York to take care of a few things and speak on the infamous panel, I couldn’t find anything good on the radio — not uncommon even in a city, but an irritating condition of travel in the Poconos. I felt tired, but jumpy too, and I didn’t want to hear music and I couldn’t get NPR, and I still don’t know why, but I settled on a Christian radio network. The reverend delivering the sermon du jour had a soothing accent — Indiana vintage, I think — and spoke in even tones, and he didn’t seem particularly rabid or right-wing morally, so I just left the dial there and listened to the lesson. The reverend had chosen a passage from First Corinthians, about the spiritual gifts given to us by God. (It’s the twelfth chapter, I believe.) The metaphor as written by Paul puts Jesus at the head of the spiritual “body,” and each of us becomes a part of that body — a hand, an eye, whatever. The lesson, from what I gathered, is that we shouldn’t question our gifts, or envy others their gifts, but rather employ our gifts as God has given them to us, trusting that God has use of them in the church and in the world, trusting that the hands need the eyes and the eyes need the hands and so on.

It’s not that lofty a message, in the end. After all, much of First Corinthians consists of executive minutes from a church schism Paul had to negotiate in Corinth, with a bit of editorializing by Paul thrown in for good measure; the chapter in question really deals with using one’s gifts within the framework of a congregation. In other words, it’s easy to interpret it as related to the verse from Mark about not hiding your light beneath a bushel, instead of as the early Christian version of Successories, which is closer to the intent. But I listened to the reverend meander through a story about eating sweetbreads in a French restaurant, and I turned the idea over in my mind — what gift do I have; what have I done with it; whether I should consider writing my gift, or look beyond writing for something else I can give to the world.

I never listen to Christian radio, ever, because it gives me the heebies, and a lot of the stuff they say doesn’t seem terribly “Christian.” I don’t know why I made an exception that day. But I’ve thought about that chapter of First Corinthians a lot since then. I’ve wondered if writing is enough of a “gift.” It doesn’t seem like one the world has much use for, these days. I tell myself that it sufficed for Paul, but, you know, that’s Paul. He’s a saint. I’ve got doubts.

The cats have had a bit of difficulty adjusting to the new digs. Hobey does a lot of aggrieved yowling, presumably to test the sound design in the loft, and also a lot of expectant sitting by the front door — why, I don’t know.

Little Joe, on the other hand, has elected to investigate every inch of shelving in the apartment, but he doesn’t seem to have grasped the basic physics that will allow him to walk on said shelves without causing them to give way. Ten days ago, while marauding among the flatware, Joe tried to skirt a large bowl; as he walked around it on the outside edge, the shelf gave way, and Joe, the bowl, two other shelves, and several coffee cups and other bowls came crashing down. Joe dashed under the lowboy, his tail the size of a small tree. I scolded him, checked his paws for cuts, and swept up the mess. “This stuff doesn’t belong to me, you know,” I informed his tail, which stuck out non-cleverly from under the lowboy. “You could get hurt.” “Mee.” “Yeah, well, ‘sorry’ won’t glue this shit back together, fat boy.” “Mee.” “Uh huh. Oh, and by the way, it’s not ‘hiding’ if I can see your tail.”

The next night, at four in the morning, it happened again. Three more shelves…a dozen wineglasses and several plates and saucers…Joe under the lowboy with a very large tail. This time, I had to floor-walk the whole right side of the apartment looking for stray shards of glass, so angry with Joe that I burst into tears. “You IDIOT!” I hissed at him. “These glasses aren’t even MINE! I have to go out of town — what if you break a glass and step in it and bleed to death, and I’m not HERE? STOP IT!” “Mee.” “Silence, you IMP! And if you’re going to hide, HIDE, because I! Can SEE! YOUR! TAIL!”

I went away. I came home. Two nights ago, Joe decided to mix things up a bit by breaking a bookshelf. Jerked out of sleep by a horrendous crash, I stormed over to survey the wreckage, and then in spite of myself, I began narrating the clean-up like a CNN reporter. “Judy, I’m down here at ground zero in Unit 408, where the splinter group known as ‘Little Joe’ continues its assault on domestic sanity.”

And then they moved my table in Hell to a private room.

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