Minneapolis

Lucinda Williams wrote a song called "Minneapolis". and I keep thinking about it today.

"I can always trace it back
To that night in Minneapolis
Here on the seventh floor in a room I can't call mine
Deadbolt on the door, do not disturb sign
Shaking and trembling
On the clean white linen
Slivers of starlight across the ceiling
A dozen yellow roses
All that's left in Minneapolis"

That could be any city, really, depending on your state of mind. I've never been there but I hear it's a great literary spot and clearly there's a heart and soul in the music, too. I can't even organize my thoughts yet for the people there, suffering today beyond my comprehension. Of all the many ways I see and hear of human suffering and loss of life, the ones that really strike at my heart the most are the times when people are just going about their damned business, and tragedy strikes from out of the actual blue. I mean, if you're on the way home from work, you're stuck in traffic, you're singing, you're thinking about what to pick up for dinner or a story you want to tell your wife or did you actually really pay the credit card bill?

And the bridge goes out from underneath you, and you end up trapped in your car under the Mississippi River. It's so unthinkable and yet these random losses seem to happen quite frequently.

After 9/11 there were so many stories about people who called in sick to the World Trade Center that day, people who had doctor's appointments or got stuck on a late subway train, and missed the disaster. I remember reading them, and thinking about what to me seems the randomness of life - or is it indeed, as the cliches go, "part of the plan"? "Not your time"? There really is no way to know the answer to this, other than the ones we create for ourselves to make sense of a world that mostly doesn't.

We have so much trust in our infrastructures, the literal and figurative bridges that get us across to wherever it is we need or have to be. We really need to, I guess, or it would be difficult to go anywhere. But the reality is, as this story shows, that these things can go out from under us - both the bridges themselves and the psychological constructs that tell us that they won't, they surely won't, how could they. Of COURSE he'll make it home. Of COURSE it's safe to drive in the snow. And how in the world could a supposedly stable pile of concrete just collapse?

I used to work at a bookstore with a mechanical engineer from Croatia, likely considered a genius in his own country, but working alongside me in a retail gig where people treated him like an idiot because of his accent, his dreamy way of pondering questions, and his limited grasp of our incredibly flawed and clumsy computer system. One day I was getting into my car in the parking garage outside of our store, and he was standing there, staring at the pillars and the cement walls.

"If I make this in my country, I go to jail," he said, marveling at the ineptitude of the original garage builder as I did at a place where you'd go to jail for shoddy workmanship. He was completely serious, though. I wonder where he is now, and if he's watching the news. Our country and our cities are aging. There are so many more of us. We have to share the space. It seems so much more complicated, and I'm willing to stick my neck out and say that it is.

I'm not a "she's in a better place" sort of person, except in extreme circumstances of painful illness that ends in death, where the person is ready to go. I don't know where that "place" is, in spite of the efforts of my parochial schooling to convince me. I don't really ever want to go there, if I'm honest. I want every day of this messy and fascinating life that I can possibly be allotted, because I never get tired of it, in theory, even when it practice it is as challenging as it is today. I'm still here. I don't want to drown in my little orange car underneath a collapsed bridge, just because I left work ten minutes early or late, or bailed out of a traffic jam to take an alternate route home. And I certainly don't want that to happen to anyone who makes my life with their love and friendship. I'm selfish that way, and I know that the people who were on that bridge and didn't make it - and certainly the people who love them, who might still be waiting for them to be brought home - felt and feel that way too.

The Red Cross has a site for families and community members just like they had for Katrina.