A friend of mine who's a TV news executive was passionately telling me the other night how his priorities have been shifted by the disaster, that he suddenly doesn't care very much any more about ratings and profits. But I also heard another TV executive I know suggesting, guiltlessly, that the deaths of 6,000 people in the World Trade Center presented a great opportunity for a certain show on his network. And as shocking as the second executive's cynicism was at first, I realized I also found the fact of it perversely reassuring. Reassuring because it showed me that for all of our sadness and shock and fear at this moment, life is going on, in all of its shades and flavors, from the venal and tasteless to the heroic and noble. Life goes on, I realized with pleasure last week, days after the attack, when the farmers who come in trucks with their produce to East 16th Street in Manhattan were back, selling us tomatoes and basil and sweet corn.
Life goes on.
My friend and fellow New Yorker Alice Trillin happened to die after a long illness the day after the attacks, having just returned from Novia Scotia, where she had insisted on spending her last summer, as she spent every summer, in her garden tending her peas and peonies. Life does go on, I felt with the absolute cleansing certainty of a deep breath, when I finally got out of this shocked, confused city and spent last weekend sitting in a sunny garden in upstate New York. In our garden in the Clove Valley, nothing had changed since the 11th. The angelica and echinacea and sunflowers are still blooming. The lavender and Russian sage are still fragrant.