The mild temperature last weekend enticed you into turning off the air conditioner and keeping the windows open for the first time in recent memory. And that let in the sound on Sunday afternoon that you should have been expecting, but weren’t prepared for.
First came the sirens, dozens of them, followed by bleating insistent horns — the kind that fire trucks use only when rushing toward a disaster, but unable to penetrate gridlocked traffic.
Instinctively, you recalled the fetish for anniversaries by people who have never heard your name, but still wish you dead. And you thought, shamefully: Please let this cavalcade of rescuers be going someplace else.
Stepping to the window, you saw scores of ambulances race through an intersection, many of them liveried in the unfamiliar colors of other cities, other states. But, to your relief, they were followed by hundreds of motorcycles, many bearing flags, revving their engines triumphantly.
Of course, you thought. It’s that time of year.
Against your will, you remembered the first time you were allowed to come home, a few days after. Driven down West Street in the back of a police car. Crowds holding signs and cheering as you passed the barricade, and you wondering what they were cheering for.
Being lectured that you were entering a crime scene, and an accident investigation site, and a military operations zone, all rolled into one. Staring at the pictures in lobbies of airplane black boxes, and thinking, “why are they called that when they are actually orange?”
And the miasma still suspended in the air: as much a taste, as a smell — an almost palpable texture of pulverized concrete, powdered metal, and seared grease. And you could feel it saturate not just your clothes and your hair, but your mouth, your nostrils, your pleura.
When you were a child, and frightened by the things that terrorize children, the Old Man used to joke: “You gotta die of something.” But he had shed tears of relief upon realizing that the tragedy he had watched on television was one his grown child had experienced at close range, and he never said that again.
Chastened, he instead offered this: Almost nobody gets to decide when or how they leave this world. But the lucky few get to choose where, and with whom.
The Cleveland Clinic advises that 20 breaths per minute is the normal rate of respiration for a healthy adult. Extrapolate from minutes to days to years, and you get roughly 189,216,000 lungs full of oxygen since that day. Each one a benefaction.
Now, well into the second half of life, those breaths occasionally come less easily. This is to be expected with the onset of age, you assure yourself. Or might it be something else?
Strangely enough, you decide, it matters little how many commas will be needed to quantify the inspirations and expirations yet to come. Because if the last breath is drawn in this place, among these people, you will count yourself among the very lucky few.