It was 4:03 p.m. when the neighbors started banging on our door, shouting “CNN! CNN!” We turned on the television after the first plane hit the World Trade Center and were transfixed for several days. We’d just been on a sailing trip in Greece for my father’s 70th birthday and he and I stopped by Florence, Italy for a few days before I was to fly home to California.
The Italian people were shocked and very supportive of the American tourists and ex-pats in their midst. On September 12, I joined the citta di Firenze in the main piazza where we held hands, over a thousand of us, and listened to the bells toll. Every day for the next week I started my day, after Dad and I cooked breakfast together, by visiting the U.S. Consulate to check on when the flight ban would be lifted, then the downtown office of my airline to see when I could catch a flight home.
Consul staff immediately invited me to a religious service to remember the dead, which was very moving. Every shop owner, waiter, everyone said how sorry they were for my (!) loss. And when I finally got a flight through Rome to LAX, the U.S. Customs Agent said one thing to me upon the end of a long flight, “Welcome home,” upon which I just broke into tears.
Back in California, everyone was talking about the attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Because everyone was so open, and so raw from the knowledge that our world had been turned upside down, that I met my future husband that first week in October.
I don’t know what would have happened had I been in California at the time of the attacks, but doubt I would have been holding the hands of unknown foreigners in a town square or at a special Mass. But America did come together in those weeks and months while politicians decided how to deal with the issue and new regulations were implemented at airports ostensibly to protect us. Our President let us know we were all Americans, and Rudy Giuliani, then America’s Mayor, made us all feel safer in a way.
Nineteen years later, and we were hit with another catastrophe, one that cost the US over a million lives, and that’s COVID-19. Instead of urging us to come together, our President was more worried about his re-election, and created a divide between red and blue states, caring for one at the expense of the other.
The pandemic that should have been a call to arms for all Americans instead devolved into a war over “freedom” as evinced by face masks and school closures. Certain Americans are still trying to reap whatever benefits they seek to glean off perpetuating these differences. COVID became something China did to us and our stellar medical infrastructure of public health researchers, doctors and first responders are still being questioned over their recommendations and methods.
COVID hasn’t become something we collectively got together to fight and, in its persistence to infect worldwide, has since turned into a blame game with science itself being questioned.
Last time I was in Florence, the Consulate was locked up tight, under military guard, and no-one is allowed to walk within a block of the place. Very different from me walking in, greeting front desk staff by name, and being kidded about getting me back home through Canada but I’d have to stay, in summer dresses, in a chilly climate until flights were allowed into the US from Canada! And America’s Mayor, how far he’s fallen, now disbarred and begging for fund-raisers for exorbitant legal fees for his alleged misdeeds.
There is no way I want to go back to the 50’s to what some call the “good old days” when women and people of color and LGBTQ+ had no rights and there was a right-wing white male patriarchal solely “christian” country we now call home. It would be nice if we could be civil to each other, respect one another’s views and work together to solve the nation’s problems. If we did that, the next 9/11 or global pandemic might have us working together for the benefit of all. Wouldn’t that be terrific. Cheers! Dee
Cooking with Dee 