So it almost goes without saying that she liked people who took chances. A hundred years ago in the late '80s -- a whole other galaxy ago -- my brother started his own company with a rotund woman 10 years his senior named Mary. She looked like Tiny Tim, the frazzle-haired, pop-eyed guy with the ukulele who sang nonsense songs in the '60s, only she was round and, to take her word for it, female.
She harbored hope her relationship with my brother would expand beyond the office, but to his credit I doubt he did anything to foster that hope. By that time, he literally lived at their office, which was in her garage, and this was Newport Beach, Calif., with no shortage of brainless, walking bathing-suit stuffers for him to ball, and since he lived in her garage, I'm figuring that's where he balled them.
But Mary kept hoping. Then my brother got drunk at a gathering of potential investors one day and dry humped someone's wife during a slow dance. There wasn't even a dance floor, just a carpeted area in front of the coffee table in the living room of a friend's home. I don't even think dancing was on the agenda, but my brother was drunk and the wife of another man was drunk, and I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time, to undulate like eels linked at the loins in front of everyone, blobbery tongues flopping like raw liver strips into each other's mouths. Mary saw that and her face fell, just fell, along with all her hopes.
She dissolved the business, lost everything and so did my brother, but he had less to lose. My mother was known to be miserly with the tender spots in her heart back then, but that day she gave one to Mary, that's for sure. Mary had put everything she could into that venture, even her heart, "and she fell smack on her ass, poor thing," my mother would say, "but she sure landed on both butt cheeks, didn't she?" My brother fell, too, but my mother caught him. She was always catching him.
She couldn't help it. That's what parents do. They catch their kids when they fall. My own baby, Mae, can climb like a spider monkey to the top of a winged-back chair in our living room but has yet to master the descent, so she has never not fallen off. Sometimes I'm there to catch her and sometimes I'm there to pick her up afterward. But I'm always there. That's what we do. We wait for them to toddle around and topple into our arms like breathing balls of warm dough with tender little fingers pressed around our necks. Then we gather them up and take them to safety. I don't think it matters how old they are, whether they are 2 or 42, we still want to catch them when they are falling. Or try to. We can't help it.
And now I wish I didn't know this, because it makes the images of the parents looking for their children in lower Manhattan even more unbearable. All those flyers they pass out, juxtaposed with the footage of the burning towers and the people at first waving for rescue and then abandoning hope and falling. Falling. Their skirts billowing, their suit jackets flapping. A few were holding hands. Falling. I hope the parents don't look too closely at the news footage, I hope they don't recognize a dress or a shirt or something, recognize their child falling, falling like tears down the face of a great structure stripped of its might.
Don't look, I'd tell them. Not you, not the parents. We'll look for you, and we'll tell you that they didn't die alone. We were there, we were watching them fall and we wanted to catch them, too. Jesus God, we just wanted to pluck them from the air like stray feathers after a pillow fight, cup them in our hands and keep them safe. But we couldn't and we're sorry.
We're sorry we couldn't catch them and we couldn't save them, and we are massively sorry you couldn't either. So don't look, for now, and instead try to think how loved they are by everyone, billions of us, and how part of us died with them and was reborn because of them.
So, in the end, they are not uncaught and they are not unsaved. They fell, yes, they fell into our hearts and that is where they'll stay.
