Just before 4 p.m this afternoon., I was channel surfing to try to find something on tv my mother might sit down and watch. We had just watched Bonanza on TVLand. I thought she might sit a while for the Ellen DeGeneres show, so I punched in NBC.
Instead of Ellen, a news report was on. A plane had just crashed into a building in New York City, and the screen showed flames pouring out of the windows of the bujilding.
OMG. Not again! I could feel my stomach clenching.
No, not again.
This time it’s a small private plane that came down nose first into an apartment building and crashed into the street. Four people dead; one still strapped into a cockpit seat.
The newscasters get on the internet and start searching for the type of plane, the owner, etc. etc.
I watch the fire blazing from the 40 something floor of the building, the black smoke billowing out, the fire engines rushing to the scene. When I actually post this later tonight, I no doubt will have links, but right now, it’s still happening.
There just seems like an awful lot of bad things happening in NYC. Last week or so, a building mysteriously “detonated.” This week, the plane, the plane.
We get the NYC news here in the Catskill Mountains. Each night we are innundated with killings of all kinds. If it’s not the killings in Iraq, it’s the murders in New York City. No wonder I escape these days into Adriana Trigiani’s books about Big Stone Gap and Big Cherry Holler — filled with people who don’t kill and live deeply and uniquely in a world that I’m sure must still exist somewhere.
It is almost 7:30 p.m. now, and they’ve identified the pilot of the plane. Cory Lidle, Yankees pitcher, is already being memorialized on the Internet. I heard on the television news earlier that four people were dead, but Lidle seems to be the only one at this point being mourned.
My mom doesn’t like living here in such an isolated piece of the woods at the foot of the mountain. She’s afraid of the dark.
That is not the kind of dark that frightens me.