Nine eleven and all that

(In sff.net, talking about photographs and memories...)

Dave, in a corner of a bookcase in my office in Florida is a stack of photographs from Vietnam, along with my Bowie knife and dogtags and the wallet and notebook I carried there, impregnated with laterite grime.

All except the dogtags. I had a young guest once who was high on speed and went on a cleaning frenzy, and he scrubbed the past off my dogtags. It's hard to explain the sadness I felt when he proudly showed me the gleaming evidence of his labors.

Well, he's buried out back. No problems.

Pleasant day yesterday. Got a good morning's writing done, and then we took the T out to Arlington, to the apartment we stayed in the past five years, and picked up our bikes. Rode back through Somerville to Kendall Square. Left the bikes in my office at MIT and spent a pleasant couple of hours wandering through the Kendall Fair, eating junkish food and enjoying the crowd. A lot of locals dressed up like the Mardi Gras partiers in Treme. Wrong season, but I guess when you've shelled out hundreds for a fancy costume, you want to wear it.

Came back and relaxed over dinner, and then back on the T to roll into Central Square. Jon Monsarrat scored us free tickets to the Hound of the Baskervilles comedy at the Central Square Theater. It was pretty broad slapstick with a few literary jokes, and fun. Three actors playing sixteen roles on minimal sets.

Ten years ago today, I was working on my novel _Listen to the Raven_ and Gay said there was something on the radio about a plane hitting a building. I turned on the television just in time to see the second plane strike. I remember thinking it was like being present at Pearl Harbor.

Of course it was something more complex. A turning point, but in more dimensions than a point can express.

Joe