After 9/11

I had not believed that I could quite regain my familiar sentimental bearings in Ithaca, New York after 9/11, and within a few days was driving to the Mississippi delta. I spent a few days in Clarksdale, walking the streets aimlessly, drinking vodkas at the Ground Zero Blues Club, and generally feeling more at home, and safe, and myself, than anywhere other than Ithaca. Several people, seeing the license plates on my Saab, would wave or honk: reaching out with sympathy. I now cannot dissociate Clarksdale from well-being, or from Jacqueline Nassar, who must have been then idling around town, in a school. In Oxford, at Faulkner's Rowan Oak home, reverie under the trees is very easy to achieve, as well as the notion that I had read Faulkner's books with more comprehension than I had ever allowed myself to believe, and that I had loved his prose sense with deep recognition. Headed home, I stopped in Jackson at a diner. There I admired America more than I knew, with pride and wonder, appreciating that just days after the horror of 9/11, someone in the United States had taken the initiative
to produce and distribute the bright yellow urinal splash guard with the likeness of Osama bin Laden, onto which I was peeing that morning's two beers.