Today is the 5th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
On my way home from work today, I got a call from Wil. It was 3 am in DC when he called, and I was surprised as anyone who receives a call from someone else during the darkest hours of their day. Turns out he had trouble sleeping, unable to prevent his mind from ruminating on that horrible day.
“I’ve been thinking about that day, about how I’ve changed in the past five years.”
During the same time one year ago, I wrote briefly about what was going on in my head when I first heard the news of the attacks on my way to work that day. While chatting with Wil, he mentioned that he had blacked most of the memories of that day out of his head. I, on the other hand, remember everything with a crisp lucidity that has maybe only attached itself to a select handful of other important memories. He mentioned that he did remember going to the candlight vigil later that week at Dolores Park, which led us to talk about the “Candle of Life.” This story thus goes:
Wil, Angela, and I brought our candles out to the highest point of Dolores Park and just sat there, watching other San Franciscans gather both where we were, as well as near the bottom of the hill. This was Craigslist at its most efficient. A few people brought guitars but just laid next to them, staring up at the sky, perhaps thinking that the moment didn’t need any musical accompaniment. Everyone brought candles. As the sun set, while overlooking downtown San Francisco, the three of us lit our candles and sat quietly. I’ll never know what either Wil or Angela was thinking, but for me I was marveling at how throngs of people who never met each other could find a spot to congregate, and do nothing but just sit. I do remember thinking that all the candles looked really pretty scattered all throughout the park, and then thinking that maybe I wasn’t supposed to think they were pretty. Maybe I was supposed to just be sad.
Somewhere during the course of that evening, I decided I didn’t want to let go of that feeling of togetherness. San Francisco is a pretty warm place, not temperature-wise but people-wise, and even then I was feeling a strange communal warmth that I didn’t really want to shake. So I told my two friends that I was going to let my candle burn all the way down. I dubbed it the “Candle of Life,” and I balanced it on my lap as Angela drove us to Safeway to get us food, then cradled it through the grocery aisles. Back at home, I set it down on the coffee table as we joined the others at our house to watch the 9/11 “Tribute to Heroes” telethon. Afterwards, we found ourselves talking about our feelings, much as we had done the past few days as very few of us went to work in the days following the 11th. Then, I went into my room and laid the candle next to my bed. It still had a long way to go, which was fitting since I had chosen such a dramatic name for it.
The next thing I knew, my entire dresser (one of those cheap Tupperware type roller-dressers that I had picked up somewhere) was on fire. It was almost 4 am in the morning, and my entire room was flickering in the glow of the “Fire of Life.” I stumbled out into the kitchen and somehow got my hands on the smallest pot in our arsenal of cookware, and then proceeded to fill it up with water from the tap, all the while watching the hallway grow brighter and brighter. Finally, with the pot three quarters full, I ran into the room and sprayed my dresser with enough water to cook a packet of ramen.
For all the good it did, I might as well have spit into it.
As I ran back, blabbering something in my half-confused, half-asleep state, Wil rumbled up from his room upstairs, saw what was going on and ran into my room, then took off his shirt and with about four huge smacks snuffed the fire out. The whole time, I was still in the kitchen, still with the tiny little pot in my hand, still trying to fill it up. Where there once was a huge orange glow, there now was nothing but a huge cloud of smoke and the putrid smell of burning plastic. Will, shirtless and clearly agitated at having to save the life of a roommate who had a working heater in his room, stumbled back downstairs without saying a word.
And that is my “Candle of Life” story, which in the ensuing days became re-titled as the “How the Candle of Life Almost Turned Into the Candle of Death” story. The moral of both stories is that even in times of great distress, of great sadness, of anxiety and fear and confusion, one thing will remain a constant in the fabric of our great country: I will also be a stupid, fucking idiot.
Thanks for saving my life, Wil. Thanks for giving me a call today and to remind me how young we all were back then. Thanks to Harsha, Joe, Jason, Mike, Sabrina, Angela, Annie, Homer, Jerry, and all the other good friends with whom I huddled together during that terrible week that will never be completely wiped from our memories.
And as promised, here is a mention of Wil’s zest for life…and an odd addendum to that is when he first mentioned that I should write about said zest in my blog, I had this strange image of Wil holding a bar of Zest soap, with all this water squirting out of the soap, just like in those old Zest commercials. I guess whenever I think about Wil and his passion for living, I think of soap. And you know what? There’s something oddly fitting about that.
