1st: a memoery

Fear is hard for children to fully comprehend. I’m not talking about the kind of fear one has of, say, failing a test. I mean Fear, with a capitol F. That communal feeling of terror that spreads faster than sound, faster then it is possible to measure. The fear that death and injury can strike at any time, or place, with no warning, that reduces friendly conversation to nervous small talk, with the participants look nervously around for the merest hint of danger.  I mean the kind of primal terror that makes the streets rank with Fear. The heightened awareness behind every eye. The kind of dread of being hurt, or your love ones hurting, that only those who have lived for a certain amount of time know.

This fear was present in London, England, July, 2005. The war that the UK was helping fight over seas in the Middle East finally came home to roost. On July 7^th, 2005, London was the victim of 4 terrorist attacks, 3 on the tube, during rush hour, and one on a double Decker bus, and hour later. That was the day I arrived in England for the first time. I was 11.

 Maybe if we hadn’t been having a lot of memorials back home right before I left, maybe I would have caught on earlier. Maybe if I had listen to what the people in the street were talking about in their hushed, nervous conversations, or glanced at the papers littered the streets, maybe I would have pieced it together. But as it would happen, I didn’t find out till the day we went to visit Hide Park, on July 9^th.

            It was a grey day. The sky the color of an old battle ship, grey, old and marred, as the clouds turned and twisted in the wind. Here and there the sun broke through the iron curtain, the contrast akin to my radiant, ignorant, smile among the dread filled faces of those around me. The grass and the leaves on the trees were a leafy green, and made me reminiscent of golden gate park. Unlike golden gate park, Hide Park radiated order. The tan, sand and dirt paths were neat and clear, the gnarled trees in tidy rows. But at the same time, the facts my mother had told me about the park weighted it down with history, both grim and cheerful.

 I was still a little sleepy, as I was still adjusting to the nine hour time difference, but happy.  My younger sister, Julia, my two cousins, josh and Alex and I were walking ahead a little bit of our grope. We were discussing a quiz show we had seen on English television the night before, called “The Weakest Link”, hosted by a cold and deadly serious, silver main hostess. “You are the weakest link, Good bye!!” we quoted, mocking the hostess catch-phrase dismissal of failed contestants. As we approached the center of the park, we stopped, so the rest of our group could catch up, as we were quite always ahead. We  observed a memorial service, attended by grim, sad faced men, mainly old, but a few were in their twenties, and a few women, some of whom were crying silently to them self’s as a old, weak faced man made a speech, in a quite sad voice I just quite couldn’t make out. Next to him were about fifteen easels, sporting reathed pictures, of happy looking people. “What do you think happened?” I asked my companions. We were silent for a moment, before my cousin Josh, the older of my cusions, spoke. “It’s probably because of the bombings,” he suggested. “what bombings?” I asked, surprised, as me and my little sister both glaced at josh. “Don’t you know? “ he retorted, as he glanced at me quizicly. Not wanting to have to deal with my cousins annoying habit of making me beg him for the whole story before telling, I rushed back to my parents. “Josh told me there were bombings, what happened?” I demanded of my parents. They shared a worried look, before explain to me the tragedy that had happened just two days earlier.  They explained that they didn’t want me and my sister to worry, and get really scared. As they explained this to me I felt that I should be scared, but I wasn’t. It was just…. something. I wasn’t hurt by the bombings, so I was confused as to why they would think I’d be scared. The rest of the day I glared at my parents for not trusting me, for thinking me a “scared cat”. But this quickly passed as I was submerged into the wonders of that forin land.

Now, years later, I look back on this time, a clear memory of innocence I no longer poses. I didn’t see the dread on the faces of the people, beck when I was 11. I just thought that’s just how things were. But now, remembering walking those path ways, walking the streets, I recognize the looks of fear and pain that plastered the faces of locals of London. Inocenses is as much a curse as it is a blessing. The more we proscue that witch we love, the more pain we are exposed to, and that experience of pain is magnifies our fears.