9/11, 911, September 11, 2001...
For many of us this date, like the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or when Neil Armstrong Walked on the moon, or when the Challenger Space shuttle exploded will have a personal etch on our individual psychees.
Though these images, and stories will play a momentary part in the visage of who we are as a collective group and what we stand for in the coming days, [years?] as individuals- it's not really that "moment" or any singular event that becomes a defining allegory- it most likely is the culmination of all those events and perhaps something I'd call "The No-events" that make up our definition of who we've become or the culminated singularity that defines "me" [or "us" or "we"]...
Follow my logic here- no one event during the course of our day truly defines how that day has gone; provided that event in its own singularity didn't monopolize that set of waking hours. But have you noticed that tehre can be trends of events that inexorably begin to create life altering points of view?
Here's how I see things having shaped up starting with July of 2001:
July 12, 2001- Space Shuttle Atlantis [at least, I think it was Atlantis...] makes its next flight into space- and almost at the very same hour, my son is born into this world.
September 11, 2001- There's been enough written, speculated, truncated, flipped, slipped, boogered and snookered concerning "9/11" to the point of ad-nauseum. I'm not tired of reliving the facts and heartbreak of that day- I'm just tired of the finger pointing for something the majority of America found "unthinkable". Take a good look people. "Somebody" thought it up.
Most of 2002 is spent in reletive docility- my father in law has cancer, but he's plugging along as best he knows how and places a dignified face to an otherwise sidious malady. A dear uncle of the family passes away from the inevitable effects of Alzheimer's.
February 2003- My father in law learns that his cancer is terminal. by August of this same year he will hav succumbed to the malignancy that he fought to overcome.
March, 2004- My mother in law's sister also suffers from cancer, and begins to fade. My mother in law stays upstate to care for her ailing sister and watches her fade from this world by the end of July.
August 1, 2004- Shirl [my mother in law, she deserves "a name"] has had her house near ruint by a toilet pipe bursting and filling the entire house with 3 inches of water... She comes home from settling her sister's affairs to deal with the problem.
August 13, 2004- Hurricane Charlie hits us. If you ever get the opportunity to experience a hurricane for yourself, with the incessant howling winds, the sounds of God-knows-what flapping, cracking, popping, pounding against your house that seemed so invincible under any other conditions... Do yourself a favor- don't take anyone up on that opportunity.
September 6, 2004- if you didn't get enough of your house getting smacked flat here comes Frances- more of the aforementioned, just now you can add a generator to the mix so you have food, A light and a tv to know what's going on out there...
September 13- Shirly is diagnosed with 3rd stage pancreatic cancer. I still remember sitting next to her at the family table as my wife ran off into the other room to cry and Shirls looks to me and says, "I'm not ready, it's too early for this..."
September 26, 2004- trust me when I say, there is no horse so dead that you can't keep on beating it just that much longer- Mother Nature has a nasty way of proving that point... At the height of the hurricane, Shirly goes into pancreatic attack and there's no ambulance willing to brave the weather until teh storm settles to 50 mph winds- I risk the family and make the trip to the hospital myslef.
October 20, 2004- Shirly passes from her ailments.
Now you might look at this series of events and say "Wow- tough luck, pal" or perhaps there's a chagrinned element of "better him than me" that slips it's nose from benieth your computer desk...
What matters is that the events took place seperately- and though I certainly feel that all of these events have changed how I view the world [in this case, more from the subject [or should I say, subjecitve?] of life and death- not so to more "earthly concerns"] but they are distinct, and the only association is from that which springs these "coincidentals"- me.
Most all of the other events were more or less tied to other individuals, other places, other times- I wasn't the only one who got bitchslapped by three hurricanes in as little as two months, I wasn't the only one to lose a reletive- or five...
The defining goal of any one event isn't that a particular singularity created your perception of the world- it's that you allowed it to compound to other events in your life.
Big testimony coming from such a small fry as me- but you know what- this is my blog... It's my one "event" where I have some say in its creation. Where it goes, what it does.
But it's still the events of my past that will dictate how it sounds, what it will become.
That my dear reader is in some small way a form of singularity of purpose.
I continue to be- Russ
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