Abraham Lincoln passed his last hours in a cramped back bedroom in a boardinghouse across the street from Ford's Theater, mercifully unconscious, folded awkwardly onto a bed too short for him, laboring to breathe. A doctor had declared Lincoln's head wound mortal on the scene, so the dignitaries and friends gathered around him had only to wait. Shortly after dawn, the inevitable arrived. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, bereft, brought his emotions under control long enough to say, "Now he belongs to the ages."

…Unless Stanton actually said, "Now he belongs to the angels." Adam Gopnik wrote a wonderful piece on that debate for The New Yorker a few years ago and concluded, among other things, that either version is believable because either version is apt. But whichever word Stanton used, it occurs to me that Lincoln had always belonged to the ages; the ages lent him to us for a time. Out of the mythically humble beginnings, the awkward landscape of crags and dogged cowlicks that over the years became a map of grief and honor, the horror over which he found himself presiding and the straightforward sorrow with which he spoke of it to us, we built ourselves a saint. Once we had done this, the ages retrieved Lincoln, in the grisly and dramatic fashion accorded his status. And the angels must have, also.

Lincoln, I think, sensed this about himself — that he had a narrative destiny. On the narrow point, his life is a triumph of tragic plot-craft. The deaths of two of his sons seemed to bow him, physically, and sent his already high-strung wife into an accelerating tailspin of séances and compulsive shopping. His Cabinet initially held him in, at best, contempt; he had to fire and rehire the ineffectual George McClellan several times, then defeat him for a second presidential term.

But Lincoln had a gift for narrative as well, for what the nation should (or would) hear, and how. He could craft a powerful phrasing; he also understood when the phrasing, the words, would mean nothing. Interesting that the Gettysburg Address has become a rhetorical exemplar when Lincoln says, in effect, that there is nothing to say and no way to say it in the second place, that the dead and their sacrifice have already spoken. That the fallen, and where they fell, belong to the ages.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

It is elegant and structurally balanced. Lincoln both hints at and warns against a hopelessness too dark and solid to lift. You can imagine Lincoln's heavy lids, slowly closing against pain, and a prayer gathering in his mind as he wrote on the back of an envelope on a rattling train — a plea. Let something grow out of this ground that is black with blood. Any small thing. But he knows a speech is like daisies against a cannonade here, so he admits this, and he sits back down before the photographer can get set up. He puts his hat in his lap and vows to do right by these dead who belong to the ages. Or…the angels.

Don could belong to both, but the first slice of cake definitely belongs to him. Happy birthday, friend.

photo by @tina24hour, via @gothamist

Osama bin Laden is in heaven.

Upon his death, bin Laden went to heaven, as he'd expected to, a warrior of righteousness claiming his longed-for reward. An archangel escorted him to a large, lavishly appointed salon, where he found nearly three thousand people waiting in an orderly line to tell him about their deaths: the terror, the desperation, the cries of their children who survived them in the night. Each of these people takes bin Laden's hand and tells him a horrible story, and he has to listen. Occasionally, he tries to flee the room, only to find himself in front of a wall of TVs, all showing Americans blithely spending money at the Gap and McDonald's; he returns to the salon, and the line is there, endless, inexorable. "I jumped." "I burned." "I miss my mom."

When he reaches the end of the line, it begins again, and he may hear the same appalling stories of the murders he committed — or he may have to look at every stamp in a 17-album collection. He may have to make chit-chat with a lady who ate cabbage and Stilton while waiting in line, and who is now crop-dusting him so assertively that his beard begins to fall out. Another lady talks for four full days, through a karaoke microphone that feeds back constantly. He is guilt-ridden, nauseated, miserable, bored, depressed, filled with fear and self-loathing, bereft of comfort and dignity. He is, at times, compelled to wear a tutu. He always has to pee.

This is his eternity. Satisfying, no?

The vision is more satisfying, for me, than the news of his death, which, after the initial elation, left me down and queasy. I think bin Laden's demise is deeply satisfying for some; I hope it is for the many who lost friends and family on 9/11. He murdered people in front of me, and the world is a better place without him, so I'm not unhappy he's dead.

But he should have had to face us. It would have made a more fitting punishment for him, and it would have renewed our own faith in the American system, flawed and maddening as it often is.

One of ABC's commentators mentioned last night that bin Laden's bodyguards had orders to kill their boss if his capture seemed imminent, no doubt to deny us the satisfaction of bringing him back here to face his accusers — hundreds of thousands of us, orphans, widowers, older siblings, groomsmen. He would never have allowed us to force him to sit for weeks and months in a courtroom and listen to the families and friends and bosses talk about every single victim. He would never have submitted to the subsequent, massive wrongful-death suit that would have taken what remained of his money and distributed it among the families; he could never have tolerated playing out the string in a Midwestern supermax prison, unheard, forgotten, under lock and key in the country he loathed.

That's why we should have tried to make him.

There is no evening the scales of 9/11. There is a knee-jerk satisfaction, I suppose, in knowing he got shot like a dog, but it doesn't make up for, or bring back, or any of that. If we had made him come back here and sit in front of us, though…if we had quietly, carefully, firmly focused our attentions on finding him and bringing him back here to answer for his crimes…if we had devoted our intelligence energies to tracking down bin Laden and his accomplices, and given them due process, put them into a system they hated and tried to bring down? If we had done that, and only that?

That wouldn't make up for, or bring back, or any of that either. Nothing can, and if bin Laden's death lets victims' family and friends move on, then there's something good out of it. Everyone else feels how they feel. For me, nearly 10 years later, thousands of civilian and service casualties later, if this is what our vengeance hath wrought, it isn't enough. No time machine, no answers, no safety, just a sense that we have to do better.

So, in my imagination, bin Laden is in heaven, because it's not me he has to answer to, or the president, or the Navy SEALs, or even God. It's the people who got there not quite ten years ago, and I hope they hear what they need to.

The rest of us just stay here in this imperfect world and try to do better. Take care of yourselves out there.

I live close to Green-Wood Cemetery. I like it there, walking around in all the stories.

Long ago, the stories went right onto the headstones. One young man — I'll call him "Martin V.B. Thompson," though that isn't his name — met his end in the Brooklyn Navy Yard after getting caught in the machinery of a steamship. To make room for that grisly brief on his grave marker, his family abbreviated his first name: a story unto itself.

At that time, a Martin like this one lived in his quaintly punctuated street — in it, not on it as we do today — and prayed one of the strange, strong fevers of the day wouldn't carry off most of the people he knew. He had a dozen brothers as a child but only four as an adult, and they might have graduated from law school at the age of 17, gone on to patent obscure but critical improvements to the seltzer bottle, made a gazillion dollars, and founded an opera; or they might have died in shipwrecks. They might have done both. Candy factories exploded downtown and pressed the city under a boot of burnt sugar. Mosquito bites took Martin's uncle's leg and then killed him. His parents called the children after presidents and saints and forgotten skirmishes of the Revolution, and hoped these starchy names would form a protective barrier around them — one of them, at the least.

Anything could have taken him: a wet head, a loose tooth, a clogged flue. Apoplexy was not a metaphor at that time. He couldn't keep those he loved if the earth wanted them back, nor they him.

Those he loved laid Martin on a board in a back room, and washed him out of a tin pail, with a rough sponge. They bound him up to look whole and straight. They dressed him and rouged his face, and set him at a slight pitch, perhaps on some ice. People came and went, and a few of them felt faint; others ate chicken, because at that time, waiting went differently. Those he loved sat with him until the grave was ready.

The story on Martin's headstone, his world and its end, is stark and bloody, and gentle also. The fond and the horrible wouldn't seem to go together, but then that's how we find them, isn't it, at times.

Happy birthday, Don. (Can't spell "fond" without it.)

photo by BK Ninja, via Flickr

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and known, without moving the curtain to look outside, that it had started snowing?Maybe you'd had a bad or strange dream, or your child had, or a pet had stepped on your face, or maybe a garbage truck went past or a branch cracked off.Maybe the world wanted to tell you something else.

But sometimes, it only wanted to tell you that: about snow.How?How did you know to stand by for the message?That beautiful sound that is no sound at all — how can we hear it?

Do you lie there in a cave of blankets, lean on the refrigerator door, rest your chin on a spouse's shoulder, point for the baby to see, stand at the window with your hand held just so for a sill-bound cat to spring up precisely under it — do you say, to the sleeping spouse, to the fussing baby, to the cat, to the pickles in the door, to no one, as you check the closest street lamp for a cone of silence and find it there, teeming and cold, do you say things from hymnals, things only hymnals would understand?"Behold," or "lo"?Perhaps an "o," from the time before street lamps.

Do you think that this, this is the year you live in a home with a window seat?Do you look up and down your street to see if it's just you framed by the long rectangle of bathroom light, or conspiring with a dog to smite the fresh backyard powder with galloping joy?Do you hope it is just you?Or do you hope it isn't?

Do you know it isn't?

Do you find yourself humming, editing "Good King Wenceslas" to include thoughts on the morning commute, and some curse words?Do you think about hymnals again as you sing the singing more like breathing into the baby's web-soft hair — about the sadness in the Christmas songs sometimes, how long they had waited for the rose, e'er blooming, the gift that came almost in secret and that they couldn't keep?If Gabriel told Mary that part, outside our hearing — that there are nights that never spend themselves all the way.If Gabriel has ever told that part.

If you're really awake.If you're really alone.If you could just tell one person about the sound with no sound, the resolution of the minor chord that "dispels with glorious splendor / the darkness everywhere," the darkness in which you stand right now, watching the cone of silence, feeling safe and perhaps hopeful.Or perhaps remembering the things you forgot to do yesterday.

Happy birthday, Don.Stay warm out there.

Diana Vreeland once said that magic doesn't come to those who don't expect it, and I have a similar belief about ghosts: if you don't believe in them, you won't see them (or become one).And I don't believe in angels, really — didn't then, don't now.As metaphors, yes; as beings that interact with us on earth, no.Everyone has stories from that day about timing: they decided for whatever reason to drop off dry-cleaning and it put them behind, they missed the train although that never happens, they called in sick when they'd ordinarily suck it up with a cold that mild.My story from that day about timing is Don, an actual flesh-and-blood non-wingéd guy with opinions about reality TV and Thai food, and I don't know the substance of those opinions, but he must have them, because he must be a mortal being, and he must be a mortal being because, in the end, I just don't know what in the hell an angel is doing escorting me up the FDR Drive with everything else going on.

I will stipulate that God works in mysterious ways, but assigning me an angel when it is an all-hands heavenly-creatures emergency five blocks away is straight-up bad management.I mean…why?Why.Makes no sense.I appreciate the assist, mind you, if that's what happened.I just don't get it.Angels carry briefcases now?

On the other hand, he's never turned up again.No "why" to that either.

The "why" remains, always.We know why, and yet we don't.It's like the time my bag got stolen; I knew why.But I wanted to find the thief anyway, not just in the hopes that s/he still had my bag and maybe a few of the things in it, but to ask why.Why didn't you just ask me for the money?Why couldn't you just take my Filofax, pick it for a credit card and the cash, and then dump it — why did you need all my addresses and my phone?My phone calls people I know; what do you need it for?

My mother had a friend whose daughter worked at Tiffany, and Tiffany had a line of solid silver key fobs with enamel coatings that looked like vegetables, so my mom got to special-order one for me, a tomato key fob from Tiffany.When it arrived, Ma found that Tiffany had sent a pumpkin instead, and even though her friend's daughter had done Ma a favor and Ma didn't want to make it into a whole thing, and even though my tomato tattoo does look like a pumpkin when my arm is at certain angles, Ma chewed her lip and took a breath and called her friend back and said, "I know it's a favor you're doing me, but…it has to be a tomato and this is actually a pumpkin," and I mean to tell you that these various transactions took months, and when the correct beautiful Tiff-mato finally arrived, I got it for Christmas instead of for my birthday in March, and you don't care about any of that, you probably think it's stupid and what kind of tweehole has a tomato key chain anyway, but it meant something to me.It had a little ding in the side where it always clonked on the doorframe when I unlocked the deadbolt.It had a story.My mother went to a lot of trouble with that thing and got it exactly right, and then you took it, and for what?They don't make them anymore and it DIDN'T BELONG TO YOU SO WHY DID YOU DO THAT.I needed that thing that MY MOM GOT ME, you son of a bitch.

I know why.Thieves take things, it's what they do, that's the why.It's never good enough.

Looking at the light columns downtown, it's the same feeling, the same question.I love the lights, the way they look blocky and rectangular at the bottom, like buildings, and then as your eye goes up, they become fuzzier beams cutting through the clouds, but really, I want the buildings back — the actual buildings, with the people in them.I know that will never happen, and I know why, but the buildings and the people in them were stolen from all of us.That skyline belonged to us!Those people were ours. They weren't yours to take.Why did you do that?How could you steal them from us?WE NEEDED THEM.

I believe in ghosts; the idea of ghosts is necessary.Ghosts haunt the living for the living, because we need them to, but what we always really want is the person, the spirit in the body with the body, the spirit not disappearing into the clouds.If Don is a real man who is groaning at a terrible pun on a birthday card right now or staring out his office window, knowing that butter-cream frosting awaits him come dinnertime, that means that one day, maybe, I can get an answer.One answer.

Happy birthday, my friend.

I can't explain the logic, quite. I'd read in one of my scary-story compendia that, if you sense a ghost but can't see it, looking between an animal's ears in the direction of the ghost will render the ghost visible to you. But it's not like seeing a ghost will get rid of it, so I don't know why I believed that Ding served as a shield. I had to help her up onto the bed half the time (see above re: old), and once she got up there, she would sit and blink patiently until a bent knee presented itself for her to curl up tightly behind and fall asleep. Not exactly what you look for in the spirited-defense-against-the-restless-dead department — but I believed in it. We loved each other, that cat and I, and so I believed she would keep ghosts away.

I never saw a ghost (not in that house), so maybe she did.

Reading the paper today, a couple of things struck me — first, that the 9/11 coverage in the Daily News amounted to only a few pages (not counting a lifestyle story about a guy who grows "corpse flowers," which I would have to characterize as, at best, oddly timed). The lead story, in fact, talked a lot about how the anniversary is changing for victims' families, how some of them have started marking the date without going to Ground Zero, how it feels a bit different now that the five-year point has come and gone. It did feel a bit different today, out and about in the city; it seemed less hushed than in years past. I didn't get as anxious about taking a train over the Manhattan Bridge as I usually do on this day.

I leafed forward through the paper, thinking that surely I'd find more — more stories, more pictures — but I didn't, besides a few editorials, and the In Memoriam section of the death notices. And this is the second thing: the living didn't just write their memorials about the dead. They wrote them to the dead. "Another year passes. Happy Anniversary in Heaven, Gerald. Peace, Schulz." "Always in our hearts and prayers. Your loving aunts, uncles and cousins." "May you always walk in sunshine. Love always, Louie (Snapple) Florio."

"(Snapple)." Louie Florio wrote a comparatively lengthy paragraph about his late friend Daniel Suhr, a man he loved and admired. The writing is labored, but you can tell it's because it's important to Louie Florio that he get everything good about Daniel Suhr in there and get it right. And in case his friend sees it, and by some chance had another friend named Louie Florio, this Louie Florio made sure to include "(Snapple)." It is completely illogical for Louie Florio to believe that Daniel Suhr is reading the Daily News on the anniversary of his own death, or that he wouldn't know which Louie Florio wrote such lovely things about him if he were, but they loved each other, Daniel Suhr and Louie Florio, and so Louie Florio believes if he puts "(Snapple)" in there at the end, Daniel Suhr will know for sure that they're still friends.

And of course they're still friends. Louie Florio has the important part right.

Six years on, I wonder about Don. Six years, and no sign of him after that ferry pulled in and he went off towards it. Did I imagine him? Did I need someone to talk to, to walk with — someone, in short, like a friend — badly enough to conjure one? And so I believed in Don?

Unless and until he presents himself…no way to know. Maybe I did, but I don't believe that. Happy Anniversary on Earth, Don. Peace, Bunting.

We've told our stories of that day a hundred times, a thousand times: where we were, what we did, with whom, how. It's not rehearsed; it's just right there, the dividing up and sharing of the loss.

The stories of the days after, we don't tell as often. There isn't as much to tell, maybe. Maybe we don't remember them very well, or don't want to, or can't split the parts and pieces up to share.

I sat on Interstate 80 for two hours on September 12, headed back to Toronto, waiting for the Jersey state troopers to clear a hellacious car-hauler wreck; hundreds of us wandered along the border in Buffalo that night, lost, calling to each other out the car windows; the customs agents looked under every seat and mat in my little car…these things happened, but only to me.

Yes, and I've often felt forsaken
And certainly misused

I listened to music in the days after — occasionally just to have it on while I tidied up the loft, but mostly to sit there, quietly, not doing anything else, hearing it. I downloaded "The Star-Spangled Banner" so I could have it nearby, the version from the Ken Burns "Baseball" series, full of pompous trombones with a faint "play ball!" from the umpire at the end. I would put it on repeat and listen to it fifteen or twenty times in a row, sitting cocked back in my desk chair with a box of Kleenex on my lap, and I would cry and cry.

Oh, but I'm all right, I'm all right
I'm just weary to my bones
Still, you don't expect to be bright and bon vivant
So far away from home
So far away from home
I don't recall how, but at some point I seized on an old Paul Simon song, "American Tune." My family and I listened to a cassette of Simon and Garfunkel's concert in Central Park on every single car trip we went on, and I had never cared much about "American Tune" one way or the other; "Late In The Evening," which I really liked, came right after it in the set list, so I never really listened to "American Tune," just sat through it patiently.

And I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease

I had that album on for whatever reason, needing something familiar, and of course I had to listen to "America" a few dozen times — even though the cheesy keyboard on the live version always drives me nuts — because the crowd greets the "counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike" line with a happy roar. Every time I hear that line, wherever I am, I smile, because the Turnpike is a thing that belongs to me, the banks of reeds, the big blue steel dinosaurs in Kearny, the rest stops named for poets. It's mine because it's home and it's home because it's mine.

Then I guess I stopped thinking about New Jersey and went back to sweeping up, and after a while, the album came to "American Tune."

I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
Or driven to its knees

So I listened to that one a few times, and then I went online and downloaded the original version. It's just Paul Simon singing, a little guitar, some strings, talking about getting through the days.

But it's all right, it's all right
For we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road we're traveling on
I wonder what's gone wrong
I can't help it, I wonder what's gone wrong

The Central Park version is better, because they sing it together. Paul Simon's voice has a matter-of-factness to it that gives the song a shrugging "what can you do" tone; it's what keeps "Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War" from giving you diabetes, that "hey, I'm just telling you what happened" way Simon has.

Art Garfunkel's voice is dramatic, airy, pained — A Bit Much at times, for sure. But when he begins "American Tune," singing by himself, the song is a story about the two of them, between the two of them. He's singing to us, but he's also singing to Paul Simon. He's remembering.

And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly

Simon comes in on the second verse, and you get a sense of them there, surrounded by thousands of people, alone together, doing the work, telling the story. Fitting the parts of it together to build it.

And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty, sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying

I thought of my mother singing the harmony part of the song in the front seat while I sang the melody in the back. I thought of going to the top of the Statue of Liberty when I was a little girl and how, from the top there, a lock of the Statue's hair looked like a giant inch worm. I thought of hearing Times Square from my parents' front porch on New Year's Eve, hundreds of thousands of people down there, me up here, alone together.

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hours
And sing an American tune

It's bottles of wine sitting on the kitchen table between two tired people who have known each other forever. It's heads rested on shoulders in front of the TV. It's books lifted out of sleeping hands and lights turned off and foreheads kissed. It's rides home.

Maybe it doesn't say these things to you, but to me, it's a song about late movies, about highways, about Jackie Robinson, about all the people and places in the stories we tell ourselves in the middle of the night to make morning worth waiting for, about a big, awful, wonderful, scary, happy country, just like the average family is, just like life itself is.

Oh, and it's all right, it's all right it's all right
You can't be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest
That's all — I'm trying to get some rest

I listened to that song a thousand times in 2001. It's still one of my favorites, the two of them singing, to each other and to me, rueful, hopeful. It's all going to hell, they tell each other, but I saved you a seat.

Singing "Happy Birthday," and stories over cake. It's all we've got sometimes; today, Don gets both.

September 11, 2006

After a year, two years, even three, a moment, an event is still close at hand, in use, unfiled, but after four years, it's crossing over — from a thing remembered to A Memory, official and formal, tinted a polite brown, a place in the mind that is visited, a place for inside voices and a low heel.

After four years, things get lost. Weight gets lost. Four years ago, I wore a size 14. I still ate meat then, and I had a broken heart as well…or bruised, really, I guess, but either way, I applied a poultice of lemon cookies, hundreds of them, eaten in bed while reading Wharton and feeling by turns furious and pathetic. Four years ago, I had a pair of black corduroys that I probably wore five days out of seven, that hit my boot tops just so and flattened my cookie-belly out. Four years ago, I loved a pair of pants, and it loved me back, but then the pants stopped fitting and I gave them away. Who knows who's wearing them now.

Four years ago, I had a car, a charcoal-grey two-door Accord named Shadow with automatic seatbelts and a rusting-out driver's side door. I knew just how many miles she'd get to a tank, just how many bags I could fit in the trunk, just how to curl up in the back seat for a nap, just how to hook her into the space behind Wing and Glark's back gate. My dad sold the car to a girl we know a few years back, and sometimes I imagine Shadow in my hometown, parked next to the post office or in front of our church, even rustier, the stickers of a dozen years scraped off, but who knows where she is now. I don't know if she even runs anymore. Or how, or where.

Four years ago, I had a book I'd found on the search wire, back when I used to work in a bookstore. The book is a Princeton handbook from 1905, so it's not a crappy So You're A Terrified Freshman-style paperback; it's a proper book, bound, with cloth covers and incredibly detailed captions like "Fig. 3.4: Beanie." A hundred years ago, Princeton freshmen wore beanies and said things like, "Why, that's capital!" and their valets could still use the dumbwaiters in Patton Hall. Who knows when they turned the dumbwaiter shafts into closets. Who knows what became of that book. Four years is four moves ago, and every time, a few things go missing or get broken, or it's the night before the truck comes and I don't care anymore and I throw a handful of books and my Lou Gehrig giveaway statuette in with the Christmas decorations and forget to mark the side of the box. I know what it looks like, that book, and where it used to sit, which shelf I had it on, but now it's gone.

Years pass, and you can't keep everything with you. Cars rust. Phone numbers get spilled on, shoes get lent out, pictures fall down behind your desk. A clasp breaks, a pendant falls off, and it's nothing you'd have had insured; it's a thing that insured you, a talisman from someone you love or who used to love you or who's in Portland on business until Thursday, and you don't notice it gone in time, and when you go back, it's not there, swept up at three in the morning, a wink in the dustpan and then out with the trash and who knows where that trash is now. You try to keep everything with you, but you can't. Things will get lost. So many things get lost.

Four years ago, I had a guy named Don. Don is a man I met in the Bank of New York on September 11, 2001 at about 10 in the morning. When I introduced myself to Don, I had to shout over the squeal of the fire alarm. We stayed together until he got on a ferry back to New Jersey, and I haven't seen him since. Don is starting to get lost — his face, his voice, things we said, places we stood. Don isn't a thing, of course, to rust through or fade or loosen; Don is out there somewhere, checking the new watch he got for his birthday yesterday, or jamming his finger installing a car seat, or buying a latte. But Don is the thing that insured me, a talisman of familiar grace I didn't know I had on. It's still there.

September 12, 2005

For as long as you can. You will do this for as long as you can, this remembering. You will watch it happen again, on your scratchy videotape of the HBO "In Memoriam" special; you will hate seeing the buildings still standing, torn and smoking, because you know how it ends, but you will sit in front of that tape for as long as you can, until it breaks. You will listen to the reading of the names for as long as you can. You will lean out the window of your car to see the columns of light for as long as you can. You will drive past the site on the West Side Highway and look at all that sky there, sky where it doesn't belong, blue and silent and empty, for as long as you can.

You will drive other places, too — up and around the elbows of the BQE, Brooklyn laid out on both sides of you, the rusty factory fonts standing on the horizon to the right, church spires and warehouses and sea to the left, and the lady in green at ten o'clock. Over the Brooklyn Bridge, the lattices overhead fuzzing out the AM radio signal and the Chrysler Building nestled into the skyline. Down 4th Avenue in Park Slope, where the downtown looks like Oz. You will think of what is gone, and you will think of what is still here. The greatest city in the world is still here.

The Brooklyn Bridge is still here. The Angelika is still here. Gray's Papaya is still here, Broadway is still here, Yankee Stadium is still here, Trump Tower, traffic, Macy's, coffee cups whose pleasure it is to serve you, the Times, Coney Island, the subway, your friends, your family, and you. Still here. All still here.

The memory is still here, of course, and it's getting thin in spots, but you will carry it with you and pass it around like a cried-on clipping, pressing down the warped unreadable spots with the heel of your hand, and around a table, your friends and family will squeeze together to look at it and point to the clear parts, the Magic-Markered letters from third grades in Tulsa, the people who stood in line at the Blood Center for days, the pizza your mom saved for you that night. The Empire State Building (still here), defiantly full of tourists (also still here). Birthday parties. Weddings. A hundred thousand small graces, and each other. Still here. Still here, still thanking God for it, for as long as you can.

You will make sure to tell your family "I love you" at the end of every phone call, even the ones about NJ Transit schedules. You will clap your hands and shout "there they are!" during the opening sequence of Manhattan. You will remember dusk at the Canadian border, and November baseball, and Dan Rather's tears, and the women in the park wearing pictures of their little brothers around their necks, little brothers in tuxedos and graduation gowns, little brothers on rowboats and at dinner tables, little brothers in front of Christmas trees.

You will do this for as long as you can, trying to bear witness to what is gone, trying to honor what is still here, too, in your own little way, lining up happinesses and counting them, weighing the things around your own neck and finding them light. You know it isn't much, your reminding, your gratitude, but you will keep on with it anyway, every year, hoping it's at least something — a small grace, a big sister, still here, still remembering, for as long as you can.

September 13, 2004

The space has a hundred fragrances, starting with my aunt's house on Cape Cod. It's always at the end of August and it always comes into the car first, scrub pine and sand and a whiff of gasoline. Inside the house, it's salt-cured fabric and mildew and slowly decomposing athletic equipment — rusting seven irons, ping-pong paddles with dead glue and bite marks in the handles. Tricky spider webs tying the bikes together. Stiff beach towels. Wood in the act of warping. Brackish bathwater. But that first moment in the doorway, deciding on a bedroom, the smell is a thousand August afternoons ending here, a thousand children about to tip over backwards with a backpack stuffed full of summer reading and only two weeks left, decades of baked cod with lemon and mayonnaise in a foil jacket, watery oatmeal, burnt coffee, carsickness, the flea market that smells of stale popcorn, Bactine, calamine lotion, forgotten razors waiting in the cabinet, dads wondering what kind of person leaves half an inch of Myer's Dark.

After that, it's my brother's birthday cake that I made that afternoon, in a kitchen so hot I went out into the yard to lick the bowl. Sorry about the crumbs in the icing. Eh, you can't see them on this side. Ma, please, get a decent icing paddle. Cake's for eating, not watching, who cares. Ma, all right? Wavering-hot candles and the little trails of smoke, four, five, twelve, two and five. Sharp, crisp wrapping paper and the wheaty cardboard smell of Styrofoam. The official beginning of the unofficial end of summer.

Out in Jersey, cars are pulling up to the front door of a school and big, small, fat, thin, tough, frail girls are getting out with their stomachs in their mouths. The first floor smells of new backpacks and fresh-cut graphite, rich like new clothes, waxy like lipstick, sick like carpool exhaust and dread, the soupy-sweet ink of the overheating mimeograph, Mrs. Merkel sneezing at a fresh coat of watery blue paint and lining up gauze and chunky sanitary napkins left over from the boarding school days. Murphy's Oil Soap on the banisters and desks. The alcoholic sting of marker.

The air in the side staircase is thick with floor wax and cold as a tomb and smells like feathers. A dozen times I emerged on the second floor and boom, the sharp bile from the designated Nervous On The First Day Of School Hallway Barfer. Poor girl. Past the chair in the hall marking the spot where Jimmy has to mop, it switches to formaldehyde, ninth graders paralyzed in horror and Mrs. Petterson presiding over a regiment of dead frogs, and then the library — acidic paper pulp, mildewy cloth covers, sharp new laminate, and Mrs. McPherson sweating in beige wool, her rosy perfume describing a path in the stacks. Girls, hello. Girls, hello. Girls, hello.

It's hot in the lounge, and it smells of chalk and WD-40 on the locker dials. Double A is cross-legged on the floor strapping a hockey stick with tape, and around her is a corona of Prell. Gigi has fresh bagels. The lounge is full of vanilla and hairspray and mint, and the couches smell like line-dried clothes caught in the rain. Passing teachers leave wakes of black coffee and Newports and fountain pen ink and…wow, heavy patchouli. Hi, Mrs. Hutchinson. No, we don't have our art section until next trimester. Yes, we like your necklace. (She had bedhead. I know. On the first day! I know! I bet she had clay under her nails on her wedding day. I bet she did.)

And then it's over and it's moving-in day and it's hazy out and my deodorant is set to punch out already. Ernie is clomping around on the stairs, coated in a slick of sweat and Loulou; her mom is supervising, not sweating at all but happy to hug me anyway. She smells costly, like the quiet, silky preferred-shopper areas in a department store, neat and cool. Up and down the stairs with boxes and bags and milk crates. Ernie's things smell like tea. My things smell like sun. The room smells like the rooms always smell — rotting paint, dying wood, three-month-old spackle, a wet bathing suit F. Scott Fitzgerald must have left in a corner seventy years ago. It's an underground cave with windows, mossy, secret. Every time I smell it, I remember opening the door to my room freshman year and finding Supersize with a battered skate in one hand and a gooseneck lamp in the other, telling her mom, "Enough." I remember shaking her father's hand, and that he looked like a priest and smelled of ironing. I remember the sickening starchy steam in the dining hall that reminded me of every fever I'd ever had, and I thought about my mom, probably trying not to cry in the front seat on the way back home, and I thought about my brother who smelled like dough and shoelaces, and how I'd just started to like him.

I remember getting drunk on vodka with Supersize and trying on each other's boots. Real leather. Leather. Leeeehhh-thaahhhh. Dork.

The smells of apartments — sauerkraut, burnt toast, ozone, grass. I moved here seven years ago on a Tuesday in September, and after we returned the van, we lay on the futon and looked upside-down out the window and I inhaled the smells to fix them as home. Home is soot. Home is rug shampoo. Home is a woman down the hall fighting the beef burgundy recipe in Gourmet tooth and nail. I had streaks of dirt on my legs and didn't care if they stayed there forever. The sheets came over in a box with candles and dusty textbooks, and for days that's how they smelled. The Biscuit had to shower with Lemon Joy, the first soap we could find.

Toast. Basement. Joop. Bourbon. Bleach. Grip tape. Cedar. Wet cement. Men I know smell like these things, and I would know those men in the dark, even after fifty years, even in clothes their wives picked out.

The horse chestnuts come down and sour in the grass. The light at dusk suggests dead leaves and wood smoke and boots with hangnails of wet twig in the treads. It's the last of it, fusty sandals falling apart, the crickets saying ch-ch-ch, ch-ch-ch, ch-ch-ch.

I have a plastic bag in my closet that I never open, that I will never throw away. In the bag I keep a pair of stack-heeled Mary Janes and a short plaid skirt with dust in the buckles and folds. If I held them up to my face, I would smell it — a hair held up to a match at a Girl Scout campout, then magnified a hundred thousand times — but I never hold them up to my face. I never open the bag. I know the burnt super-fine fog dust is silted down at the bottom, kind of pink, kind of grey. I shouldn't hope for a little puff of the Paloma I had on that day, or a trace of Secret.

Canal Street takes me right to the Manhattan Bridge.

A gopher died in the back paddock.

My grandmother doesn't have her glasses on, and if she could see that makeup, she would never stop laughing, but it doesn't matter.

Bean has a sweater I can borrow.

It's raining so hard that Q and I have to smoke with the windows closed.

York is very nervous, and she can't stop crying but she doesn't make a sound.

Wing Chun comes out the back gate. The green tea incense Glark likes is in her hair, and butter cookies, and soap — probably pink soap.

All of these things live in the space between the seasons in my head, in my nose, all of them and more. One is still missing, but I've imagined it. The tang of a freshly dry-cleaned suit, I think, and the charred smell of filed nails, and probably hair product with a hint of berry in it, and the scent every man has — entirely of his own and defying description — that he carries with him wherever he goes, usually at the place where his ears join his head. But I didn't hug him, so I don't have it. I can't cock my head in a crowd after he passes by and say, "Oh, sure. That's him." I hope I still know him if I see him again, because I've started to forget what he looks like a little bit — not sure of the nose anymore, not sure of the color of the suit. I'd recognize the handshake, though, warm and kind and lucky.

Until we meet again, Don. Happy birthday.

September 8, 2003