Long May It Drape Us

It's flag week at Plain Sight. Three days to the Fourth.

This flag nearly made me shudder when I saw it.

The truck was stopped at a red light on Bloomfield Avenue in Montclair. I was crossing the street on foot.

It was the summer of 2005.

The ghostly taillights behind the flag arrested my senses. Not only the haunted eyes but the ghostly form of the entire flag.

Then I noticed the tattered end of the flag on the lower right side, and a hint of that dust that powdered everything close to Ground Zero in the early days. I had never seen a flag draped that way, especially on an official vehicle.

Was it a memorial to a member of that particular company, a flag of solidarity for all the lost firemen and policemen, a "Never Forget" bandana on a huge scale for all the victims and for America itself? I didn't know. The light quickly turned green, and the truck pulled away. It didn't seem to be the kind of subject you could broach to firemen in a few seconds at a red light.

Since the fifth anniversary of 9/11, I 've had the feeling we've processed the shock and horror to a degree and put it in a less vulnerable place within us, though never to be forgotten.

That follows the natural pattern of grief, but what still shocks me are the small sudden reminders that I have built a moat around the most disturbing, hellacious memories of that day and its protracted aftermath.

I'm not alone in this, but I'll just speak for myself.

For the first few years after 9/11 I rode the bus into the city nearly every week. And I dreaded that curving, nearly full-circle right turn the ramp makes as it descends to the toll booths. It left nothing but miles of merciless sky between us and the amputated lower New York skyline--from which smoke billowed, of course, for many months. The absence of those towers was stronger than their presence had been.

Looking again at this picture reminds me that as late as 2005, emotion was still very near the surface: the rawness, the sense of violation, the incredulity at the audacity and devastating success of the plan. Then there was anger, less at the perpetrators than at our own government's failure to nip the plot in the bud, to keep its eye on the ball and capture bin Laden when it had the chance, and many other things along those lines.

Crossing the street behind this fire engine gave me one of those small sudden shudders.

Now it already seems to belong to an insulated past--yet a powerful and hovering past that our own hubris and miscalculations and disregard for the protection of our troops, on the battlefield and back home, keeps painfully close.

One interesting detail in this picture that I never noticed before, but that in some way I want to regard hopefully:.

There are two flags in the picture. Can you find the other?

Tags: Montclair | 9/11 Commission | 9/11 | photography | American flags

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