I am not going to belabor how much I
hate February. I refuse. I will only say that for a short month is has a heck of a long list of offenses to answer for. How does one month become so terrifically ambitious in the dismay and mayhem department? It boggles the mind.
Beyond the regular old economic news which, honestly, is like background noise at this point (futures? oil? jobs? it's all almost quaint) my own rather quotidian worries have been rather rapidly overtaken by events that, if made into a movie or a book, no one would ever believe. Typical of my incredible good fortune, these things don't happen to me, rather they happen around me, to those to whom I am to closest. I'd rather they didn't happen at all, of course, but I suppose that's an unrealizable request.
On Friday, when news of the crash of
Flight 3407 started filtering into the news, friends and colleagues started saying things like, "Oh, I heard Buffalo and thought about your family but then realized that the town isn't
that small What are the odds?" My response? You'd be surprised.
Clarence Center is a difficult place to describe to suburbanites accustomed to towns that run into one another in one unceasing flow of buildings and cars. Clarence Center abuts my hometown of
Williamsville, New York, more or less. In between the towns there is a ruralish, sparsely-populated area and then you come to the hamlet of Clarence Center. Three, maybe four blocks long, there's a church, a coffee house, a gift shop, a bank and a firehouse. And an elementary school. The cross streets - the few of them there are - are almost entirely residential but for a contractor here or a day care center there. It's a short drive out of town into the horse, dairy and green bean farms. It's the kind of town people think about when they talk about those all-American places that Norman Rockwell might have painted.
It's surreal enough that a place I know so well, even after being away longer than I lived there as a child, was involved in something so awful and completely random and weird. The thing is, my sister lives in Clarence Center, about 100 yards from the single house that was destroyed. She now shows identification to a sheriff's deputy to return to her home after work or errands. She has described the smell in the air, one that promises to get worse before it gets better. My niece takes cover under the dining room table when a plane or helicopter is heard in the sky (just a few miles from the airport, this is not an infrequent event). The good men of the firehouse next door are doing their best to assist the federal departments that have descended, trying to do what they can before the next snow blows in mid-week.
My sister, and the town, are hurting.
Survivor guilt is the talk of the day and veterans in the area speak knowingly of PTSD. There's little I can do but be as understanding as possible in that thoroughly insufficient way of someone who isn't there, hearing the crackles of the still-smoldering fire, who isn't organizing grief counseling for the many school kids who live on that block, who isn't wondering how to begin to talk about something so totally, horrifyingly random and from which there is no protection.
