merely musing

I watched a movie last night, Smoke (1995). The gritty human stories at the center of this ensemble piece are wonderfully satisfying. It isn’t steak and potatoes, but it is sweet without being cloying, ice cream without the brain freeze, Jujubes without the toothache.

The opening scene shows an elevated train with the New York skyline behind it, complete with the then-intact Twin Towers. It stops you cold, 14 years after the movie was filmed.

Politics and patriotism notwithstanding, I’ll tell you exactly what my first thought was when I heard that the Twin Towers had collapsed. It was nothing heroic. Nothing selfless. I called my 19 year old son. I wanted to hear his voice, to know he was okay. Granted, that’s not a real rational reaction to a national emergency hundreds of miles from my home, where the tallest building is the 7-story Teachers College on the campus of Ball State University. But that was my reaction: “Oh my God, they’ll reinstate the draft, is Andy going to have to go to war??” Mine. That was where my mind went, not (I’m ashamed to admit) to the victims or their families or the heroes, but to my cherished son, then a sophomore in college, new to living on his own.

The human tendency to limit perspective to the personal isn't necessarily a bad thing. Consider Anne Frank, for instance, whose intimate view into her own small slice of the Holocaust has been a catalyst for the entire world to mourn Hitler's atrocities and excesses.

Perhaps sometimes the epic, the heroic, is encased within the personal--Oskar Schindler, or the parable about the guy who throws starfish back in the ocean. "Made a difference to that one." Can Sylvia Plath enfold Dante's Hell in her own?

Ironically, my son was killed less than a year after 9/11, the victim of corporate and individual irresponsibility, a virulent combination as lethal as war. Personal. And epic.