Knit Sisters

Icarus is such a good boy! He just doesn’t give me any trouble.

Hey, is that a sneaky way of saying that I’m boring? Because if you want trouble, I can give you trouble. Just say the word…

Sadly, things that go smoothly make very uninteresting stories.

So this is a story about a dog,

and a terrorist,

Oh, whoops. Mistakenly popped in a picture of our cat. Well, it is an error anyone could have made.

and a woman who lived by herself in a studio apartment in a high-rise in New York City. This is a story about how their paths crossed and what became of them.

I was living in New York City on September 11, 2001, but I found I could not write about this on Monday. In the midst of all the political grandstanding and television specials and the genuine grief of those who lost someone dear to them in those attacks, the task felt both overwhelming and somehow wrong, as if I would be co-opting the ongoing grief of people who suffered direct, personal losses.

I was very fortunate: I did not lose any close friends or family members. But I did lose the same thing every survivor in the city lost—a sense of security and that peculiarly American sense of invulnerability.

In the days following the attacks, my friend Cindy’s little girl, who was four at the time, kept saying to us, “Did the Empire State Building fall down too? Are all the buildings going to fall down?”

What could we tell her? When you have just seen something massive and terrible that you never dreamt could happen happen, you feel you are suddenly in a place where anything could happen. Literally anything.

What can you tell a child then?

It was like dropping through a rabbit hole into some other reality. The suddenly silent city whose silence was punctuated only the roar of the fighter jets cruising up and down the Hudson. The acrid black smoke blowing in a steady stream out to Brooklyn. The fire that kept burning and burning and burning.

My failure to find anything to laugh about for weeks, a unique phenomenon in my life. Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead playing and re-playing on my stereo.

But this is a story about a dog. About how on September 12, 2001, I took a long walk in Central Park because it seemed to me that if I moved my legs, I could outrun the shocked, stunned feeling I’d had since I woke up. The futility of my exercise notwithstanding, the park was full of people walking dogs. They appeared to be the only people that day with any kind of grip on normality.

A dog must be walked, come hell or high water. Muhammad Atta or no Muhammad Atta.

As the early fall passed into the late fall, I thought more about getting a dog, turning the idea over more seriously in my mind than I had in the previous four years, a period during which I had idly considered dog ownership, but had skittered nervously away from the responsibility, preferring a life with light personal duties and few restrictions.

I also thought more about Muhammad Atta. The hatred I felt for Atta and his compatriots was rather frightening, even to me. It was ugly and poisonous, even if it was—at some level—justified.

Then right before Thanksgiving, I adopted Shelley.

She had been dumped somewhere in Queens and she still had a slight aura of wild animal about her when I brought her home. She wasn’t certain that human beings were entirely to be trusted or that the world was a safe place. She was, in this way, a very post-9/11 dog.

But after about two weeks of walks and coaxing and daily trips to the dog park, I was playing ball with her one day when, for the first time, she cracked a huge canine grin.

This is a typical expression, but I didn’t know that at the time.

She was a huge amount of work because she was young, she had no manners, and she was wildly energetic. I was living in a studio apartment on the 27th floor of a high-rise and since we had no outdoor space, she needed three basic walks plus one two-hour trip to the dog park every day.

After three weeks of dog ownership, I was both literally weeping with exhaustion and, paradoxically, completely in love with her.

In the past five years, Shelley and I have made two cross-country moves together. We’ve hiked in canyons in California and played in dog parks on two coasts. We’ve lived in five different houses. Everything in my life has changed since the autumn of 2001.

But Shelley has been with me through all those changes. She is the one constant.

I was taught in Sunday School to love my enemies, but I have to confess that I have fallen short of loving Muhammad Atta. But neither can I hate him with the kind of fury and conviction that I once felt. Because there is a way in which Muhammad Atta gave me this dog. He didn’t intend to do any good the day he flew that plane into the Twin Towers.

But indirectly he did.

Many terrible events have taken place since September 2001. But this is a story about a dog. And it is a story about how, at my house at least, the terrorists have not won.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Icarian games, Lace it up. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.