Knocking At The Gate

Groundhog Day has always baffled me in that it seems to be a holiday without any social purpose whatsoever. There is nothing to say or buy or do, nothing to decorate, nothing to give or sing, no one in whose honor one could hold a storewide clearance sale. It follows then, that of even less usefulness is today, February 1, which was described to me by my children in a pre-dawn encounter this morning as "Groundhog Day Eve." Apart perhaps from this specious distinction, this Groundhog Day Eve was fairly unremarkable-following the festive Groundhog Day Eve greeting from my kids, I awoke, annoying at having to do so, but somehow finding fortitude in a shower and some fierce coffee; I drove to work, annoyed at having to survive the deadly inattention of drivers putting on eye makeup at ninety miles an hour in a dense fog, but somehow finding my balance in the mellow and modulated voices of those oh-so-calm commentators on National Public Radio; I did my job for the prescribed ...

Several months after the September 11, 2001 attacks, I traveled to Washington, D.C. for business. In those days and at that airport, security screening took quite a bit of time so I made a point of showing up early. When I arrived at the gate, it turns out I was a little too early and there was only one other person waiting. With no one around us except for armed and uniformed military personnel standing post, and lots of time to pass, we began to talk. It turned out that he worked for the United States Agency for International Development in another country. It turned out that we both had young children of almost exactly the same ages. Over the course of over an hour, we confessed to each other all our worries about what was coming next, how the world we grew up in had simply ceased to exist, and what might befall our children as they grew up into whatever the new world was going to become. We didn't bother to speak of party politics, because it didn't seem relevant in that em...