Everyday life must triumph over terror

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Before, on a September Sunday, I would be looking at the world in all its beauty and thinking that it's going too fast - the month, the fall, the leaves turning, every day getting shorter than the one before. I would ache to slow it down and be sad when I couldn't. September is always a bittersweet time.

Before, on a September Sunday, I would drive to church and see pumpkins for sale at Cassie's and I would think, I have to stop on the way home and get some. And I would pass a nursery full of mums, and think, I need to get mums, too, and cornstalks and hay for the wheelbarrow. And I need to repaint the wheelbarrow.

Before, on a September Sunday, I would sit in church and plan what I had to do. I had to work in the garden, cut back the dead things and plant some new things. I had to put away the summer clothes and find the winter ones. I had to pay the bills and clean off my desk and sort through the old papers and read the new ones and go to the grocery store and do laundry and vacuum and squeeze all the things I didn't get to during the week into this single day.

Before, on a September Sunday, there were so many things to do, not just chores to be done, but people to call and places to go. Hurry because it's almost Halloween. Plan because it's almost Thanksgiving. Shop because Christmas is closer than you think.

Before, there were not enough hours in the day.

Now every day feels like the middle of the night, all of us sleepwalking, going through the motions, putting one foot in front of the other, talking, even smiling sometimes, but numb, automatons, doing only what we've always done.

Before, on a September Sunday, the roads would be full of traffic, people on their way to somewhere - to movies, to museums, to football games, to pick apples, Boston jammed with tourists, hotels crowded, restaurants packed. Before there would be music spilling from cars and laughter spilling from bars and people walking around in groups and smiling.

Now Boston is a ghost town, everyone home, huddled, waiting. But waiting for what?

The mums and pumpkins are right down the street, but I have no desire to buy them, though I should, though the yard needs cheering up, though we all need cheering up. The wheelbarrow remains full of summer flowers, but I don't care. I look at it and shrug. Time feels frozen and I feel frozen, too, pumpkins and mums and cornstalks incongruous, now, signs of harvest and plenty and happier times.

And yet planting and planning and carrying on are more important than they've ever been, aren't they? Isn't this war that terrorists have started a psychological battle, too? Isn't destroying America's confidence part of the plan?

We wave flags. We hold candles. We line up on the sidewalks of our cities and towns and stand together as a symbol that this country is together and that nothing that is done to us will split us apart. But aren't our everyday lives symbols, too? What can we do, we ask ourselves and each other?

And the answer is that we must do what we've always done. Go to the movies and the theater and to our favorite restaurants. Plant daffodils and tulips that will bloom in the spring. Buy pumpkins and scarecrows. Take a trip. Shop for Christmas. Drive north to see the leaves. And turn on the radio and sing.

It is ever so much easier to wait in line to give blood than to do these normal things because they feel so abnormal now, like a sacrilege, like laughter at a grave. Our grief has done this to us. It's sapped us of our joy and immobilized us. But it is fear that is keeping us immobilized. Fear of tomorrow or of no tomorrow. Fear that nowhere and no one is safe.

I don't want to plant anything and I don't want to go to the movies. All I want to do is sit at home and read the papers and watch TV. That's what the terrorists want us to do. Because if we remain afraid, if we stay in our houses glued to our TVs, if we give up the lives we had, and abandon everything we've built, they will have won. A small band of evil men who stole four of our own planes, who murdered thousands of our own people, will have brought this nation down.

So today I'm not staying home. I'm going to buy mums and pumpkins and I'm going to play music in the car, not listen to news. And it doesn't matter if I don't feel like doing these things. I'm going to do them anyway. Because the only way the terrorists can destroy us is if we let them.