Some days don't get headlines

It's late and I'm rather exhausted, so I'll make this quick. The last two weeks or so there have been searchlights in the sky. The first few times I saw them, I kind of noticed the light without really registering them. Then it hit me - clunk - oh yeah. Those beams of light pointed straight up are the towers. The Ghost Towers.

They've been doing this subtle memorial for years - every year from 2002 on, in fact. One or two of those years I wasn't here, and didn't see them. But most years I have. And of course, in 2001 I saw the real ones burn and die.

There isn't anything to say about it here that hasn't already been said elsewhere (or even here, by me), and I don't have much to add, except this.

Humans have a remarkable ability to pick themselves up out of chaos, out of the rubble - be it physical or metaphysical - and just start walking.

I don't know if that counts as heroism. I don't know, really, if it's even an admirable quality, though I guess if you asked me, I'd say yes, of course it is. It's a remarkable thing, and it's maybe the only thing we have.

It's round about this time that I become especially aware of how colorful things are. How brilliant the sky, how rich the sunlight, how bright those umbrellas, how soft the smell of water.

It's not always an easy thing to experience sensations of normal life in the face of abnormal awfulness; it's like having someone very important to you die and then wanting to blot the sun out for a while, so you can grieve, uninterrupted.

That W.H. Auden poem. You know.

But I suspect the tendency of the world to go on beating like a great white heart, right in your face, is where we get our continued-walking ability. We have the world as our teacher - irrepressible nature, unstoppable life. It's good, I think, even when it hurts.

PS. Boywich, I am thinking of you.