It was Friday morning. I woke up on a couch, having spent the night at the apartment of four of my class-mates from dive-school. I can’t say why the television was even on that morning. Tony Meyers was from Florida and I think his girlfriend had received a telephone call from her mother, telling her to turn on the local news. It was difficult to make out what we were looking at and I was frustrated that the television was even on. What could be so important? I called my parents to find out what they knew. My mother told me that one of the Twin Towers had fallen. “Ridiculous,” I thought. “What a bunch of reactionary nonsense.”
We all walked to school a little stunned, not wanting to be late, but also not knowing if school would even be held that day. It was, and I can’t remember if the subject was salvage or haz-mat; hazardous materials handling. There were around 20 people in my dive-class, four of whom were ex-military. We all talked about going to war that day and what might happen next. I thought that soon I would at least lose my class-mate Steve Acton to the Rangers where he had already served for four years. None of us would eventually go on to enlist and eventually all of us graduated, with the exception of RIchard Burns who died in a motorcycle accident with less than two months remaining in our program.
I can remember the rhetoric in the days to follow. Turning desserts into glass and taking whole populations out of the lexicon of modern peoples were the punchlines of wishes masked as jokes and japes. We can all thank God for Hiroshima and Nagasaki in times where our collective intelligence has been undermined by a seemingly unquenchable anger. It seems we have learned, to some degree, the limitations of revenge killing on such a scale as that. And I can say, that had we murdered every Muslim believer in the days to follow the day that cowardice masked itself in religious righteousness, our world would be so very poor. In condemning our perceived enemies so, we would have lost our very souls with as much certainty as the most instrumental participants in the Nazi regime lost their’s.
After coffee with Vissy today I came back to Shpetim’s tile-stand to talk about language and life. We went over some business ideas of his which gave me a rare opportunity to explain some of the basic tenets of Christianity to him. In kind he explained some of the basics of Islam, making for a discussion which held my interest utterly. Islam is the only faith that most Albanians have ever known. Every day we wake is another day which God has given us to carry out His commission. I am so very grateful for days like today, and for friends like Shpetim.
albaniacalling 