…and I had put pencil and paper next to the bed so I got it recorded this time. It was more coherent than some.
I was driving somewhere, changing lanes right (one lane at a time) to make a turn, when I noticed police cars. They were ahead of me, though I kept an eye out for more. Two were parked with lights on, the one ahead of me didn’t have the lights on. I pulled in behind him to make the turn.
In the triangle between the street/highway and the right-hand turn was a mighty oak tree, probably just too old for me to get my arms around. It threw a lot of nice shade. Its branches hung low around it and the brush under it had grown up a bit. Coming from the brush was a tiny stream of fireworks. “Ah,” I thought, “that’s why the police are here.”
As I drove past, I noticed there were two large (say a three-foot cube each) racks/shelves of stuff that I took to be more fireworks. The some shelves were narrow top to bottom and supported flesh-colored bladders of clear, colorless liquid (shaped somewhere between a water balloon and an IV bag). Others were larger and held what looked like more conventional fireworks.
I parked my car a bit further and went for my planned walk. During my walk, I passed the front of a Chase Bank building whose front, in places, reminded me of the design of the World Trade Center, with the long vertical metal pieces (though these were much smaller and decorative, not structural). Inside the windows I could see a wooden lattice that reminded me very much of the lattice I’d seen supporting some of the shelves. It was made of 2×4 with the narrow end forward and the “boxes” were about 6 inches across.
I started hearing news reports from major news agencies concerning what I’d just passed. Each report was more alarming than the last. By the end, they were comparing the potential to the Oklahoma City and Beirut embassy bombings and the World Trade Center.
As I returned to my starting point, I saw a guy in jeans and a sport shirt (buttons, not T, colored checks) talking into a bluetooth headset and pacing a bit as he spoke. He was pretty much the only activity near the site. As I got nearer, I realized he was from CNN and turning in a report. He signed off and sat on the curb and I sat next to him.
I pointed out the lattice similarity to him. The bank could be seen from where we were sitting. He didn’t seem that interested. As we were talking, the police put a plywood wall around the triangle where the racks of stuff were, shielding our view.
A baby walked up, as it strolled between us, I stopped it, holding its hands over its head and laughing at it. It was wearing nothing but a diaper and sticky stuff on its face (so of course it kept trying to kiss me). As I was asking it “Where is your mother?” a lady came out of the nearby park to claim the child. She knew the reporter. They talked for a minute, then she and the baby returned to the park.
I turned to the reporter and said, “May I ask you a question? If this story is so big, if there is so much potential for damage, why hasn’t the park been evacuated? Is it just a slow news day and this story is being blown up before it has been truly investigated?”
And I woke up before he answered me. But you and I know the answer, don’t we? Only the bad, scary, ugly stuff gets the big headlines. They’ll make stuff up, if they have to. The good stuff gets a slot when there’s no other news. (Oh, sweet Lord, I miss the like of Walter Cronkite and Jim McKay.)
That reminds me of one of my favorite Bloom County cartoons. Opus is watching TV. The national news comes on and the anchor says, “We’ve got nothing new to report tonight, let’s go to the field.” As they poll each reporter, at each foreign location, each says the same thing. Opus turns to us and says, “When you think about it, this is actually pretty exciting.”
I wish more of us thought that way.