dog years: Safest Place in the World I'm going to Washington, DC this Friday. On Saturday, my mother, father, brother, his girlfriend, my wife, our daughter, and my 81 year old grandmother are going to take a bus from our Potomic Mills Holiday Inn to the Clarendon metro stop and ride into DC. Saturday is the dedication of the World War II memorial and my family is going to attend. It's quite an event for my grandmother. Her husband, my mother's father, was a paratrooper with the 17th Airborne Division and was stationed in France. Saturday evening, after the dedication, she will meet with the surviving members of his unit for their annual reunion. They meet in a different location every year and this year they chose the District of Columbia.
The dedication is a big deal. CNN recently reported that some 2000 law enforcement personnel from 35 separate agencies will be present. Thousands of men from Brokaw's Greatest Generation will be present. CNN reported that volunteers will be throughout the mass of people, looking for signs of respiratory distress and cardiac arrest. There will be people on horseback, bicycle, and foot. No planes will be in the sky. Sniper's will be on roofs. Radiation detectors and gas sensors will be positioned throughout the vicinity of the Reflecting Pool, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial.
If I am killed, it would be akin to drowning at a lifeguard convention.
In August of 2001April and I started trying for a baby. That September, we decided to take a week and really see the Nation's Capital. I wanted to take a tour of the White House, of the Capitol Building. April wanted to visit the Hirschhorn and the National Portrait Gallery. Dupont Circle is fun. We thought we go there and shop some. I always liked Embassy Row and Georgetown had the stairs the Exorcist rolled down.
So, after I finished a bicycle race in Greensboro, we loaded the Corolla and set off for a memorable week, a week for the two of us to spend together before we became the parents that we were hopeful to become. At a rest stop near Richmond, April reluctantly mentioned that she was late. She knows me, knows that I am prone to anxious expectation, so I know she was worried about instilling any false confidence. We relied on small talk for the remainder of the drive to DC. It kept the tension to a minimum and it allowed my mind to wander. I thought of how I would reassure her when the stresses of of it all became overwhelming. I imagined myself sneaking off to cry in the bathroom after my child was born, so I wouldn't lose the bet I made with April in early August. We arrived in Arlington, Virginia at around nine that night.
We were quests of my Uncle in Arlington and we spent a late Monday night with styrofoam boxes of Chinese food on our knees in his condominium, laughing at Letterman. When April went to bed. I walked back and checked on her. She was queasy and unsteady on her feet, and not too receptive to my concern. I went back to the television and pulled a pillow under my head. An HBO program was coming on called Band of Brothers. It chronicled an Paratrooper company's journey through WWII. I spent the wee hours of Tuesday morning watching the nightmare that was the jump of the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions into Normandy. The soft, quick float of the paratroopers in the hellish fire and fog of that air was a cruel contrast. When the program ended, I thought of the stories my father told me of the maddening confusion of it all and I remembered the member of the 82nd whose parachute speared the steeple of the church at St. Mere Eglise. I saw the ground that he saw in my mind, the gray shadowy earth and the runner fires that followed fuel and oil from destroyed German army vehicles. I watched the round leave the barrel of the Infantryman's rifle as it drove toward his chest. And then I felt the blackness of the lapping silk of his parachute that eventually stuck to his uniform when he bled out.
The next morning, I had coffee with my Uncle. At nine o'clock I turned on the news just as the second plane flew into the World Trade Center Tower. I imagined the plane was a Cessna with a wayward elderly man at the controls. Maybe he forgot his heart medication.
When April woke, I went back to tell her what had happened. We shuddered when the F-15 blasted by the condominium window. On the balcony, we watched them circling the sky. We listened to the television announcer say that the Pentagon, in Arlington, had been struck and I wandered back into the condo.
That day I held April's hand and prepared myself for a reordered world. We spent the week in DC, against our relatives in NC's wishes. I talked with April's dad on the phone and told him that we were in the safest place in the world. We went to the Capitol Building and watched Senators pray. Big black Suburbans drove up and down the Mall lawn. DC police were grabbing people by their handbags and suit coats when they started down closed streets. We were in the National Gallery of Art and Air and Space. We went to Dupont Circle. People were quiet, It wasn't fun.
We were of a few people who chose to continue on with their visit. It was evident. And because of the lack of people on the Mall and in the restaurants and on the Metro, the world felt lighter, and the space left by the three thousand lost was apparent, if just by suggestion.
I'll be with my family this Saturday, sitting on an aluminum bleacher somewhere between the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool. I'll be surrounded by elderly soldiers and their sons and daughters of veterans. The deaths of men and women will the the subject of many speakers. And I'll be in the safest place in the world.
