TIME PASSAGES

Some dates are markers in our lives. We use them to remember what happened in a public arena, how that affected our personal lives and sometimes even our culture.  It is not unusual to hear these dates used as a reference: “post 9-11.” Although I was not living on December 07, 1941, I do have this date as a life marker.  If anyone says December 7^th to me I immediately think of Pearl Harbor.  This is just like November 22—JFK, and of course September 11^th—9-11.  I remember when I was a child, hearing my Dad talk about being in high school in Baltimore and how it was late Sunday afternoon when they found out what happened at a little known navy base in a place called Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  At that time it was not even a state.  It was a possession in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Few Americans even knew or cared about this little group of islands three thousand miles west of California.  That all quickly changed in a very few hours when FDR declared “December 7, 1941, a day that will live in infamy…” 

This was a day that changed my life even though it happened seven years before I was born.  In part, my father’s attitudes and beliefs were formed by walking out of high school and on to a battlefield.  My mother was engaged to a man who came back an alcoholic and she did not marry him.  My first husband was a war baby who did not see his father until he was four years old.  My second husband’s father was in the RAF and his mother went through the Blitz in London.  He grew up in post war London and experienced the depression in England in the 50’s.

I have had a number of experiences with time marker dates in my life and at least one of them has probably changed the course of my life in some very direct ways.  I was living in London in 2001 and experienced the incidents of 9-11 through the filters of living in a foreign country.  I find now, after speaking to many other Americans, which although my feelings were very similar to most Americans my experiences with my neighbors and the people around me were a little different. 

I felt so down and depressed about what had happened and being outside the US just seemed to make me feel more isolated.  That weekend my husband decided that it would do me good to get out and go see his mother who live about 40 miles away.  We took the bus because we did not own a car.  Everyone who heard me speak and realized that I was American gave me their condolences and had something nice to say about my country.  At noon that day at the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace the Queen’s Guard Band played to Star Spangled Banner.  This is something that had never been done before.  When I heard it on the news that evening it made me cry to know that the British people were reaching out to Americans with kindness and respect. 

The repercussions of 9-11 had a direct effect on my life.  I was an international tour director at the time.  The tourism business just kind of bottomed out for a while and my job became an economic casualty of the rebound fear that people felt about traveling.  I needed to return to work so I did something I thought I would never do again.  I returned to the health care professions.  For a long time I was angry that someone I did not even know could have so direct an effect on my life.  I felt that he had taken away my freedom of choice and taken the lives of many innocent Americans to prove a point in a fanatical religious point of view. 

As purely a personal footnote in my life, today’s remembrance at the Arizona Monument (the 70^th anniversary) has a special meaning for me.  Don, my first husband, was given a flag when he retired from active duty in 1981 (the 40^th anniversary year), today that same flag will fly over the Arizona.  A certificate will be made and the flag will be signed in the white binding by the man who put it up.  As it turns out, this man is a retired master diver who knows my son Bob.  Also within the next few days my oldest grandson will leave to go to Afghanistan.  He will spend six months with a Marine Corp unit.  Once again one fanatical mad man’s beliefs are being imposed on me and my family.   I wonder if this is what he meant when John Donne wrote, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main….. “