Ground Zero en juillet

“You can fly from the stuff that spills around you.”

—David Byrne, “Home”

Paris, after 10 in the morning. On the terrace. Sweating. The entire French Air Force flies low overhead, in formation. Mirage jets streak across the sky, small black sharks. Then cargo jets, blue whales of war.

It’s Bastille Day. At Stuyvesant, I took French for two years before transferring to Hebrew, where the grading was easier. A decade ago, I married a Parisian, and my sons mostly converse in French.

A Finnish diplomat in Tel Aviv says we are children of the summer. This morning in Paris, I feel winter’s breath amidst the scalding heat sans air conditioning. I’ve felt this before, on a crisp and sunny September day, not a cloud in the sky. I was a senior at Stuyvesant, and my first class was at 9:30 a.m. When the second tower fell, we ran away. We escaped. Most of us dispersed up the West Side Highway. We scattered.

Did summer end when those jets slammed into the towers? The star-spangled banners were omnipresent that fall, even on the subway cars from Atlantic Avenue, near Brooklyn Tech, where Stuyvesant held classes for a month after the towers fell.

Summer’s garden ends for everyone, though perhaps a bit less if you live in Australia. I flew into the mild Australian winter in June of 2016 and spent two Septembers working from Sydney. Australia was safe, the safest I’d ever felt. I had escaped from New York, from Brooklyn, from Stuyvesant.

My wife and I returned to Washington, D.C., to have a child. He was born on September 3, and I have no memory of the 11th that year.

Adam and Eve can’t go back, but parenting unlocks doors to other hidden gardens of healing.

In elementary school winters, I’d flee February’s frigidity for Fort Lauderdale. Solace was to be found in the chlorinated waters of the pool in my grandmother’s retirement community. When the second tower fell, I briefly contemplated jumping into the Hudson.

After 25 years, I find myself back under the water with my son in a pool in Bandol, holding my breath, counting. Parenting draws you back into the waters of summer.

It’s not the same water, but that’s alright. It never was.