SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2001
Saturday’s a great day to get your bomb shelter in order. As my wife and I do our best to clear out all the junk that’s piled up there since the last time we thought there’d be a war (it wasn’t that long ago, just a year back, when the Intifada broke out), my young daughter is busy making up the list of friends she wants to invite to her upcoming birthday party. A weighty question: Should she invite Tali, who didn’t invite my daughter to her birthday party? We discuss the problem, trying to muster all the gravity it deserves, just so that we can at least keep up an appearance of routine. But the terrorist attacks in the United States have robbed us of that illusion, of the possibility of depending on some sort of logical continuity. The thought is always hovering in the air: Who knows where we will be a month from now?