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The Window | Sep 21 2001

After my parents broke up for good, my father began a practice of visiting each Sunday and spending three or four uncomfortable hours with me and my sister. Unenthused (to put it mildly), my father would invariably arrive late for these visits, often hours late, and would sometimes call long after he was due to arrive to tell us that he would be there shortly – and then appear later still.

It sounds awful, I know, and I suppose it was awful, but the one solace in it was that it was PREDICTABLE. My father was ALWAYS late. The specific amount of lateness varied, but at least one knew with certainty that he would not arrive on time. This helped tremendously. Rather than wait around, I would go outside and play with my friends.

My sister was another case. As the appointed hour approached, she would drag a chair to the dining room window and sit there staring into the street. She chose this particular window, if it isn’t obvious, because it afforded the earliest possible view of his car.

This sounds pathetic, I know, and it was pathetic. Moreover it angered me because it seemed that my sister was deliberately hurting herself; and for what? I could never understand this. Why expose yourself, time and again, to certain heartbreak? This struck me as an act of grave stupidity.

Two nights back our president spoke on television again. I went outside and played, more or less (actually I stayed inside and worked). Then I visited the handful of websites I enjoy, all of them personal sites, and caught up with what folks had written that day. Leslie Harpold began with a paragraph about the president’s speech, comparing it to a pep rally.

This pissed me off, not so much because of Leslie’s observation, which I’m certain was accurate, but because it reminded me of all the statements of astonishment I’ve been hearing about the sensationalist dreck being churned out these days by our media. Could any half-thinking person have expected something better? I find this difficult to even imagine. Similarly, I cannot fathom how anyone could express surprise, as many have, by the degree of hatred that these “cowardly” terrorists must have felt for America. The issue of cowardliness aside, America is despised by huge numbers of people around the world. We knew this already, just as we knew the reasons for it.

Just as we know, by the way, that the industrialized world, led by our own country, is rapidly depleting and destroying the earth’s resources and ecosystem.

Bringing in the ecosystem may seem beside the point, but it is not. Our collective way of life – which was attacked last week, according to our president – is predicated on destruction and denial on a massive scale. And our government is committed to preserving this state of affairs, both here and abroad, at any cost.

All of which you already knew, just as you know whose interests it serves.

But here’s something you may not know: 15,000 years ago, the American West had about as many large mammals, proportionately, as the Serangetti plains of Africa, including elephants, horses, lions and camels. It took the first humans on this continent a mere 1,000 years to pretty much wipe them all out. I learned this today from a book called “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” a few pages of which Rachel read to me on the subway. Rachel wondered why people didn’t domesticate some of these animals – a far superior long-term strategy – so I pointed out that these folks had no reason to think beyond a single season, if that. Why think long-term when one can simply walk outside and kill some big, delicious animal? (The killing was particularly easy then, as humans were new to town and thus unfeared.)

We are no different than our predecessors. Why think long-term when one can simply walk outside and buy some big, delicious automobile?

Um, I seem to have the lost the thread. Wasn’t I speaking about my sister? I believe I was. And then I digressed into a rehashing of what every thinking person supposedly knows, capped off with an anecdote about extinction and short-term thinking. Frankly, this piece is beginning to resemble the workings of my mind these days: one thought leading to another without any hope of conclusion.

How does one end such a thing? I have no idea. Fortunately I must leave for a dinner party in twelve minutes and have resolved to post what I have, in whatever shape it is in, making the question moot.

I apologize for hurrying off and leaving you with the mess. I will return when I can and try to make sense of it, if sense can be made.

Or not. Probably not. Probably I will move on to other thoughts, other pieces, and leave this one as it is, unresolved.

Don’t wait by the window for me.