PeaceBang Family Terror Alert
Oh, man.
My mom is planning to fly from New York to London on Tuesday.
She says she's going to go. She says she won't even need a tranquilizer.
I'M going to need the tranquilizer.
Jesus.
This is my mom, though.
She freaks out if I tell her I got into a man's car without doing a full background check, but she'll fly to London from New York knowing that a major terrorist plot to blow up planes flying between the two cities was just thwarted like twenty minutes ago.
I am currently reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. I love the way she understands that extreme grief can be a kind of mental illness. I had never heard any intelligent person state that so matter-of-factly before, and I found it it to be a great comfort. I have myself, in times of extreme grief, felt my mind unhinge; almost observing it from someplace beyond myself. Didion reports the same phenomenon, and I will turn to her for solace the next time a big, killing loss comes along.
It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. I don't know where I heard that -- it was part of an NPR report years ago on the death of a famous pair of spouses in history (Clover Adams and her husband? I don't remember), but the reporter used that quote. I have never forgotten it. I say it all the time to myself.
I am not going to draw a deep breath until Mom comes home safe.
http://gbgm-umc.org/cam/memorials/fearful.html
My mom is planning to fly from New York to London on Tuesday.
She says she's going to go. She says she won't even need a tranquilizer.
I'M going to need the tranquilizer.
Jesus.
This is my mom, though.
She freaks out if I tell her I got into a man's car without doing a full background check, but she'll fly to London from New York knowing that a major terrorist plot to blow up planes flying between the two cities was just thwarted like twenty minutes ago.
I am currently reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. I love the way she understands that extreme grief can be a kind of mental illness. I had never heard any intelligent person state that so matter-of-factly before, and I found it it to be a great comfort. I have myself, in times of extreme grief, felt my mind unhinge; almost observing it from someplace beyond myself. Didion reports the same phenomenon, and I will turn to her for solace the next time a big, killing loss comes along.
It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. I don't know where I heard that -- it was part of an NPR report years ago on the death of a famous pair of spouses in history (Clover Adams and her husband? I don't remember), but the reporter used that quote. I have never forgotten it. I say it all the time to myself.
I am not going to draw a deep breath until Mom comes home safe.
http://gbgm-umc.org/cam/memorials/fearful.html
posted by PeaceBang at 9:47 PM
2 Comments:
Your mom is a brave woman. I usually laugh in the face of things like that - what frightens me most is the mundane death, the plain old car accident, the heart attack, the choking on a meatball - but still, in the same WEEK?
I think she'll be okay. I'm praying so (don't know to whom, but still I pray). On the upside, things might be a little cheaper. After the big SARS scare, I flew to Toronto for $350 - just a month before, it was $800 for the same dates! And of course I didn't get SARS.
p.s. I heard duct tape works pretty well on feisty moms.
I understand your fear.
That said... the objective of terrorism has already been achieved.
I'll be rather astonished if anything actually happens.
The cabal was broken--turned in, I'll note, by Muslims who recognized that what was going on was just plain wrong. Not by brilliant policework. Not by armies fighting them over there so we don't have to over here (pardon me while I spit...).
The few who might still be at large aren't off committing their master crime. They're hiding.
The media's busy making this into as big a deal as they can (it sells), and the administration is blowing it up as big and scary as they can (it serves -- remember, Lamont and all Democrats (except Joementum) are evil-doer terrorists effectively in league with Al Qaeda...).
The security facade is studiously forbidding anyone to get on a plane with anything vaguely liquid (and the Brits are disallowing anything electronic, too).
She's as safe right now, flying to London and back, as any of us are. Beats having her out driving. Even if we don't think that's true, the numbers are definitive.
Applaud her.
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