MountainMornings

I know there is an election, and a lot of news about Mr T courtesy of Bob Woodward’s new book: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/us/politics/woodward-trump-rage-takeaways.html

But did you know there was a horrific fire this week in a refugee camp on the island of Lesbos in Greece? 13,000 people were living in squalor before the fire, and now 10 EU countries have accepted some 400 unaccompanied Moria children. While I was reading this article I couldn’t help but think of that ship of Jewish refugees during the holocaust – neither Cuba nor the United States would give them safe harbor.

They were sent back to Germany to be killed.

The Rocker called us yesterday while he was walking our granddog Leo. Even though the wildfires are hundreds of miles from LA, he told us the air was pink and orange and you could taste the smoke in the back of your mouth. Temperatures out there reached 115 degrees last week. Bob told him that our sunsets were supposed to be spectacular now because of the wind carrying that air all the way to Nashville.

Did you know that every fire has its own name? https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/california-fire-map/ Just in September California has had the ElDorado, the Valley Fire, the Oak Fire, the Willow Fire and of course the Creek Fire. Not to mention the 17 fires that started in July and August! One supposedly by the pyrotechnics at a “Gender Reveal Party?” Isn’t having a baby shower enough; why must couples go to extremes about the X or Y chromosome?

Today is a solemn day. Sometimes I forget September 11th. I look at the calendar and fill in all the “Christmas Party” birthdays – my two Brides, my sister. I leave the porch door open in the morning because there’s a chill in the air. I deliver tiny apple pie snacks to the L’il Pumpkin because he’s finally going to IRL (in real life) Kindergarten.

But I remember that acrid smell when I visited my sister in NYC to celebrate our birthdays nineteen years ago. It’s a smell like no other. I remember that strange sky, and the firemen dusted in grey crowding into Irish bars for lunch. Their big, black boots on the brass footstool. Working on “the pile,” recovering the remains of lives lost.

I remember trying to shop for the Bride’s birthday that year, the year she graduated from Duke. She was in DC at her first job in a government building; would planes still fly? I roamed around an empty store, feeling numb. Looking at other eyes devoid of feeling. I decided on a sweater to keep her warm, I would FedEx her gift.

In the Torah, if a wedding and a funeral procession meet on a street, the funeral must stop for the wedding – because life takes precedence, always.

The Rocker left high school that day to watch the smoke from the Towers drift over the bay at Sandy Hook. It was the most glorious sky that morning, a Tiffany blue with no clouds. We wondered how could a small plane hit the World Trade Center on such a beautiful morning, until we saw the second plane.

Climate extremes and gender reveal parties aside, today the refugee crisis in Greece is directly related to us, to what happened to us on 9/11. Most of the migrants there were fleeing Afghanistan. We are trapped in Dante’s circle.