The audacity of hope
When I woke up on September 11, 2001, it was another typical day for me: I’d been up too late the night before and my head was pounding, I’d already smoked three cigarettes before leaving my dirty, unkempt studio on the Upper East Side, I was running at least 20 minutes late for my crap job at a financial newsletter, my white button-down was unironed and already sporting a brown Pollockian drip series thanks to the Diet Coke I’d clumsily slammed while slathering too-dark foundation on my bloated, pasty face.In short, I looked like a hot mess, felt like a hot mess and things were about to get much worse.
I’d just extracted myself (barely) from the biggest ego-melting, cortisol-pumping, heart-mushing break-up of my life and I was still writing bad prose poems about the object of my affection, sloshing down discount red wine almost nightly, painting a water-color mural at all hours on the ceiling of my rental while crying on the phone to my Mom and suffering from the kind of self-pity, aimlessness and self-hatred only Irish Catholics raised by laissez faire parents in the plasticized, stone-fenced Astroturf play-land of Connecticut can be forced to / afford to suffer from.
By the time I got to work, it was clear my former roster of “problems” was laughable.
That, of course, is when I started helplessly cackling and crying and smoking and wandering the streets and talking to and hugging bloody survivors in tattered clothes and handing out cigarettes to people who’d quit smoking decades ago and finally getting a hold of my Dad who was in the Pentagon when the planes hit and my barely coherent Mom who was packing up their house in Connecticut that day to move to D.C. to join my father in their new apartment in Georgetown and then talking to or getting reports on my friends and exes and cousins, some of whom had also barely escaped the attacks in New York and D.C., and eventually making a bee-line to a bar to meet my best friend Martha to furtively drink a beer and feel guilty for drinking a beer while our city was in ashes and we could smell the incinerated corpses and just stare in cold shock at each other and then, finally, I slowly, silently, smokelessly trundled home to eat cold baked beans and drink a lot more beer in front of the looping coverage of the day on TV, knowing I had to change my life.
And the wars happened. Then the tsunami; Katrina; countless quakes and other natural disasters.
But again and again and again and again, I hear about and see tiny wild flowers spring up amid the detritus strewn across the (so far) disaster-choked aughts. Blooms that are preventing this decade from becoming a giant memorial to the disasters and the dead, its various dedications and ornaments choked with dying bouquets and weeds.
In the wake of 9/11, I saw scores of friends and associates revamp their lives: get married, change careers, toss toxic paradigms and most of all — look inward. New York took a breath – I can still tell who was here during 9/11 and who wasn’t without asking. And it’s been seven years.
I quit my job to do a documentary about homeless people in Mexico City – and when the funding and insurance fell through, I found a job working for a radio show. It paid peanuts and my more challenging day-to-day duties generally involved buying black silk bikini briefs for my overweight male boss, picking up my boss’s wife’s dry cleaning, sweeping (yes, sweeping!) the office and fetching paper clips for members of the staff too lazy to waddle to the supply closet themselves.
The upside: free concerts. I also met two of my dearest friends there. Oh yes, and my husband! And I eventually got out and got back on my perambulating path through various media outlets.
But that’s nothing: Petra Nemcova, the supermodel survivor of the Tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people has eschewed la vida loca for charity work – she runs the Happy Hearts Fund, which helps rebuild the lives of children who have lived through disasters, natural or otherwise.
But what always inspires me most (more than pampered supermodels or relatively pampered New Yorkers who decide to essentially tweak their various versions of the status quo so it looks better on paper or makes them rest easier at night) are stories about people who have no right to be hopeful or bright eyed, people who from birth were denied the basic right to exceed their way-station in life, but who are anyway – people who have the audacity to hope.
Like a poverty-stricken, estranged, unhappy middle-aged couple who were trapped together in the quake in China that killed 32,000 plus. Their story was recently featured in The New York Times:
“Mr. Wang, 40, had just returned home two days earlier, after traveling around the country for half a year and trying his hand at small businesses. He had lost a lot of money. He and his wife rarely spoke. He spent the Chinese New Year in the city of Guangzhou by himself, skipping China’s most important family holiday.”
They spent hours in the rubble, entwined by the crushing weight of the collapsed factory worker’s dormitory they lived in. At one point, Mr. Wang tried to kill himself by twisting his neck in the rubble, but Ms. Li reminded him of their daughter, of happier times in the past and of the possibility of a new life.
“The only thing we had was each other,” Mr. Wang said. “We encouraged each other to live on, and we said once we got out, we’d live a good life and care for each other. Now we have a new start.”
The full story’s here.
