William Elliott Hazelgrove Decmber 13, 2001
Hemingways Attic Oak Park, IL
These essays were written soon
after the tragedy of Sept 11, 2001. I was struggling with my
novel and like everyone else was knocked out of my life. It was
so damn sunny and there was so much death. I saw neighbors walking
around in a daze. The planes ceased to fly. The phones worked
sporadically. My son came home from school and my wife fled the
high rise where she worked in Chicago. We watched television
like a religion and wondered if a nuclear bomb would be next.
That seems all very far away now. The war has been
won. Life goes on. But there are those people still under the
World Trade Center. We don't see much of that on the news anymore.
The dead are always subservient to the living. People are flying
again and the stock market is climbing back. Christmas is 
almost here. September
11 has already taken on the historical mythology of Pearl Harbor
and is fast becoming as distant.
We Americans don't like to dwell on the past. We
are doers. Let's move on. Let's roll. The past is behind us.
Let's go settle the frontier, start a business, have a family.
But, we are diminished. There has been a fundamental change and
only time will tell us what is effects are. When I began asking
authors for essays I thought of this book as a document of the
present, but now I see it is a historical document. It is already
a time capsule of those days in September.
When I reread the essays I was struck how they
had become photographs. They were snapshots of a world gone mad.
Our world. These writers were trying to grapple with something
incomprehensible. I suppose some succeeded where others failed
but now they have all become testaments to their time. Amazing
that history should move in so fast but it has. We will all tell
our children and grandchildren about that day in September and
they will listen the way we listened to accounts of a peaceful
Sunday when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor.
Our children might glimmer some of the horror,
the uncertainty, the madness of those days, but they will never
know it. For it is of our time. We lived it and we will take
it with us to the grave. I suppose that's what these essays are
finally all about.
*Bill Hazelgrove's first novel, RIPPLES, was
published in 1992 and awarded "Editor's Choice" by
the American Library Association. He is also 
the
author of TOBACCO STICKS & MICA HIGHWAYS.
