Page 571 - WhyAsInY

sWeet sixteen
A day or two after the attack, having assured our family that we were alright, Kathy and I attended a benefit for the fallen at the Metro- politan Opera. The entire Met chorus opened the evening with an incredibly stirring rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But the highlight of the evening was a gripping version of the beautiful chorus of lamentation “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s Nabucco, which the singers fol- lowed with an encore performance for the tear-filled audience.
For a long time, in part because of a rash of anonymous letters laced with anthrax spores that were mailed to some media outlets and public officials—letters that were not connected to those who were responsible for 9/11—people were gripped with fears of what might come next. For whatever reason—partly to be reassuring to Kathy and primarily because I believed it—I took the position that we’d seen the last of the attacks. I hate to say it, but so far so good. (I don’t see the self-directed San Bernardino and Orlando mass shootings as attacks that are compa- rable to the attacks of September 11.) But the world had changed— irrevocably, it seems.
The Monstrosity
Let us now leave the serious and turn to the ridiculous.
When we contracted for 16 Church Lane South, we knew that, as beautiful as it was or could be, it had a number of deficiencies. Chief among them were the varying sizes of the six bedrooms, as I have men- tioned. We never dealt with that problem physically. But there was also the fact that, because it was built in the 1930s and not modernized at all, it lacked a “family room.” Apart from the kitchen, which itself needed total upgrading, there was only one place where we could gather to watch TV. (Who uses a classic, formal living room for that in this day and age?) That was the library, the small room to the left of the entrance hallway, which was more suited to being used as an office than as a place for evening entertainment. We had therefore sought the services of an architect in advance of the closing to remedy that and other problems,
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