Today on NPR, I heard an account of various world events related to and immediately following the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001. I came into the broadcast midway through and don't know who produced it, but the spin and narrator were definitely British. Two things really stood out to me. One was the referral to Shrub as "President Bush Jr.". The other was a replaying of the the Star Spangled Banner (at Buckingham Palace?) on 13 September, 2001. For some reason, the latter--more than anything else in the report--took me right back to the time. I cried.

I cried on 13 September, 2001, as well. I'm still not sure why. Was it because it was so fundamentally "decent"? Was it because it was proof that "our flag was still there"? It made me think of the old saw, "If a tree falls in the woods..." That scenario presents a fundamental question regarding whether or not a witness is essential to existence. If England saluted us with our national anthem, it meant they could still see our flag. That meant it was still there. That meant that we still existed. Is that why I cried?

The song "London Pride" makes me cry similarly. When I was a young girl, I read many books set against the backdrop of World War II. The Lion, The Witch, & the Wardrobe was based on Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy being sent away from London to stay with an uncle because of the air-raids. Most of the other books in the series provided additional glimpses of WW II England. The Dawn of Fear was about the reality of war descending into the lives of children, as well. The Diary of Anne Frank was almost too much to bear. I sat clutching the book to my chest as I doubled over and sobbed when I realized that the diary ended because Anne was captured and died. She just ceased to be. Prior to that, the only autobiographical works I'd read were the Laura Ingalls Wilder series. I had no context for such devastating, mind-bending injustice. The Hiding Place was about ordinary people doing extraordinary things in outrageous circumstance; things we can only know as true because one of them lived to tell about it, due to a clerical error. I connected with the strange mix of terror and practicality that suffused the atmosphere of the books. My own home was a battle zone of shifting alliances and objectives. Echoes of its siege mentality persisted throughout much of my adult life and occasionally drop in for tea in the present.

In school we learned battle dates and remote-seeming facts about what happened in Europe and Asia. In those books and others, real (to me) children were dealing with real losses in situations that were completely out of control. I remember feeling raw horror when I realized the bombs were being dropped on mommies and daddies, on babies and grandmothers, on non-military people who were trying to live their lives and be good to one another. The bombing of London expanded in my mind and evolved into something that lasted for years rather than days. I grieved for the families of the people who disappeared. Somewhere in the eye of mind was born an image of humble, noble people gathered by candlelight singing "London Pride" in sincere tones. I realize how mawkish it sounds by the light of today, but it was very tender to me then and some vestige of the sentiment carries through to the present.

Is it the simple faith of playing music in the face of unspeakable grief? Is that why I cried?

I don't know. But I'm grateful for the journey of trying to figure it out.

London Pride has been handed down to us.
London Pride is a flower that's free.
London Pride is our own dear town to us,
And our pride it forever will be.


Copyright 2003 Seasmoke All Rights Reserved. London Pride belongs to the man what wrote it and whose name escapes me in this moment but I'm pretty sure he also wrote "The Stately Homes Of England"