Remembering 9/11

Exactly 10 years on and I am in London watching BBC specials in which NY and London memorials are reading through the names of the lost.  And I realized that I never wrote down what I remember from that day.

It was my 6th wedding anniversary and Mr McGarry was in Nashville working on a shoot for a cable show.  The phone rang at about 6:40am LA time. I assumed it was Russ being funny and wishing me a happy annivesary early.  I ignored it.  It rang again.  Pulling myself out of bed, I answered the phone with growing irritation, but was surprised to hear the voice of my Mother-in-law, weeping.  "We're at war!  They're attacking us!"  She told me to turn on the tv.  I don't remember what I said, or even if I said anything.  My neighbor, Joel, was up and his tv was on.  I remember going across the hall to his place.  I remember watching the televised broadcasts, which were on all channels, but the timeline seems comfusing as the events were just happening.  They tended to show both live feed and rebroadcast which made it hard to figure out what was happening, not to mention that the events were so shoking in the first place.  Even now, I'm not sure what had happened by the time I tuned in, but I do believe that I was watching the towers fall as it happened. 

Not knowing what to do, I went to work.  But along the way, driving up La Brea, people in their cars turned and looked at other drivers with a sense of worry and empathy and connection, and that was the only time in LA I ever felt connected to other drivers while driving.  Along the way, I listened to NPR rebroadcasting Rudy Guliani as he walked around the towers before they fell.  I remember the emotion in his voice as he talked about seeing people jump.

I remember hearing that the plane had hit the ground in Pennsylvania.  And that there was a sense that maybe that was the last one, but no one could be sure.

Once at work, of course we all watched the tvs in the conference rooms.  We didn't get much work done.  And by 10:30, word got around that we should all just go home anyway.  Some of us, were continuing to hang around as we didn't' have much else to do.  But then we were told that we HAD to get out.  There was a threat to studios in LA and we were half a block from the Burbank airport.  We were a credible target.  And we were told to leave the building at once.

That night, I walked down my street to a small impromptu memorial.  The little group of us just sat on the curb with beer and candles talking about people we knew there in NY.  And we all asked why.

That was a Tuesday.  On the Sunday before, I had a show at ACME comedy theatre.  There was a small earthquake on my way to the theatre which really shook me up.  I asked to be able to go back home and check on things.  Everything was fine, but I had this strange feeling that something was horribly wrong.  The next day, I had been reading about the Taliban's treatment of women and I was looking up petitions urging Americans to take action.

It wasn't until Saturday when Russ was able to travel again.  I went to LAX and had to park really far away.  Trams carried passengers from the airport to the lots about a mile or so away where we were all waiting.  As buses released passengers, families reunited for the first time since the tragedy.

We knew the world had changed.  That was clear to me from the moment of that phone call.

Faversham Hops Festival

Since 1966, the Notting Hill Carnival has been the place to go for the August bank holiday.  And since the 1980s, the Hops Festival in Kent has been the place to go - if you happen to be in Kent.  While the Notting Hill Carnival was much bigger, the Hops Festival was much more of a festival.  I had heard that you should do the Carnival, just to say you did it, and then you never have to do it again.  Which implies that it isn't worth repeating.  Ad that made me wonder if it is worth doing in the first place.  

The Carnival, to me, was little more than several thousand people crowding onto the streets to drink and smoke and listen to music.  Which is fine except that there wasn't
 so much of a Carnival theme as it was just a giant pub theme.  The floats, when we were there at 2p on adult day, were just flat bead trucks with some speakers and a man, shirtless, singing along with the music.  There was nothing to buy but food, which included jerk chicken, roasted corn, sugar cane and coconut.  I was told later that they don't do vendors selling litems because stuff just gets stolen.    Ater a couple of hours of wandering through the neighborhoods, we felt like we had done all the carnival had to offer, and that was to drink.

By contrast, the Hops Fetival was a lively event.  There were plenty of things to buy, such as hats, fudge, beer of many loccal varieties, antiques, toys...the list is endless.  The shops were open and busy, compared to Notting Hill, whose shops were not only closed, but boarded up out of fear from the  recent riots.
  People were dressed in costumes or wore funny hats.  I was quite surprised to see a lack of that at the carnival, but guessing by the photos seen since, I was just there at the wrong time.  Maybe it's just too difficult to sustain a sense of fun over two days in Central London.

There were dance troupes who wandered about, performing regularly an old English folk dance that involved sticks being hit repeatedly then dancing in a circle.  The music which accompanied he dance was a charming piece that instantly made you think of Ye Olde English village.  There were also groups in similar folk costumes,but entirely in black.  These groups also had black painted faces, which coming from the American South has always been strictly verboden in my corner of the world.  But here, it had a Goth like feel, or perhaps reminiscing of the Schmutzli of German origin, the Dirty Man who accompanies Santa on St Nicks Day in German cultures.  I didn't get to see their dance, but I'm sure it was really cool.

I started to get the feeling of being in a village  when it celebrates the harvest.  There was tonnes of hops plants everywhere.  We got wreaths made to wear on our heads and on the dogs, which made us all smell even more like beer.  The hops were piled onto a wagon, which I imagined used to roll into the village and all the townspeople would cheer and dance.  Everyone was so happy and joyful, perhaps because it was sunny.  Perhaps it was he beer.  Or a combination of everything all put together.  
But there was a delightful sense of celebration that was contagious. Why was that missing from the Carnival?  Is it city life that is so oppressive?  Is there nothing to celebrate in the city?