The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  I sit on the couch at night with my son. He watches TV as I read the National Enquirer and the Star. This is wicked of me, I know, but the Enquirer and the Star have almost more pictures than words; there are bright pictures of movie stars, of television anchors, of the woman who almost choked to death when, in a state of morning confusion, she accidentally put spermicidal jelly on her toast. These stories are just right for the mind that wants to be diverted by something that makes no demands.

  I have time at 9. But I am so flat-lined that I find it very hard to make the heartening phone call to the nephew, to write the long letter. Often I feel guilty and treat myself with Häagen-Dazs therapy. I will join a gym if I get time.

  When a man can work while at home, he will work while at home. When a man works at home, the wall between workplace and living place, between colleague and family, is lowered or removed. Does family life spill over into work life? No. Work life spills over into family life. You do not wind up taking your son for a walk at work, you wind up teleconferencing during softball practice. This is not progress. It is not more time but less. Maybe our kids will remember us as there but not there, physically present but carrying the faces of men and women who are strategizing the sale.

  I often think how much I’d like to have a horse. Not that I ride, but I often think I’d like to learn. But if I had a horse, I would be making room for the one hour a day in which I would ride. I would be losing hours seeing to Flicka’s feeding and housing and cleaning and loving and overall well-being. This would cost money. I would have to work hard to get it. I would have less time.

  Who could do this? The rich. The rich have time because they buy it. They buy the grooms and stable keepers and accountants and bill payers and negotiators for the price of oats. Do they enjoy it? Do they think, It’s great to be rich, I get to ride a horse?

  Oh, I hope so! If you can buy time, you should buy it. This year I am going to work very hard to get some.

  * * *

  During the summer, when you were a kid, your dad worked a few towns away and left at 8:30; Mom stayed home smoking and talking and ironing. You biked to the local school yard for summer activities—twirling, lanyard making, dodgeball—until afternoon. Then you’d go home and play in the street. At 5:30 Dad was home and at 6 there was dinner—meat loaf, mashed potatoes and canned corn. Then TV and lights out.

  Now it’s more like this: Dad goes to work at 6:15, to the city, where he is an executive; Mom goes to work at the bank where she’s a vice president, but not before giving the sitter the keys and bundling the kids into the car to go to, respectively, soccer camp, arts camp, Chinese lessons, therapy, the swim meet, computer camp, a birthday party, a play date. Then home for an impromptu barbecue of turkey burgers and a salad with fresh Parmesan cheese followed by summer homework, Nintendo and TV—the kids lying splayed on the couch, dead eyed, like denizens of a Chinese opium den—followed by “Hi, Mom,” “Hi, Dad” and bed.

  Life is so much more interesting now! It’s not boring, like 1957. There are things to do: The culture is broader, more sophisticated; there’s more wit and creativity to be witnessed and enjoyed. Moms, kids and dads have more options, more possibilities. This is good. The bad news is that our options leave us exhausted when we pursue them and embarrassed when we don’t.

  Good news: Mothers do not become secret Valium addicts out of boredom and loneliness, as they did 30 and 40 years ago. And Dad’s conversation is more interesting than his father’s. He knows how Michael Jordan acted on the Nike shoot, and tells us. The other night Dad worked late and then they all went to a celebratory dinner at Rao’s where they sat in a booth next to Warren Beatty, who was discussing with his publicist the media campaign for “Bulworth.” Beatty looked great, had a certain watchful dignity, ordered the vodka penne.

  Bad news: Mom hasn’t noticed but she’s half mad from stress. Her face is older than her mother’s, less innocent, because she has burned through her facial subcutaneous fat and because she unconsciously holds her jaw muscles in a tense way. But it’s OK because the collagen, the Botox, the Retin-A and alpha hydroxy, and a better diet than her mother’s (Grandma lived on starch, it was the all-carb diet) leave her looking more… fit. She does not have her mother’s soft, maternal weight. The kids do not feel a pillowy yielding when they hug her; they feel muscles and smell Chanel body moisturizer.

  When Mother makes fund-raising calls for the school, she does not know it but she barks: “Yeah, this is Claire Marietta on the cookie drive we need your cookies tomorrow at 3 in the gym if you’re late the office is open till 4 or you can write a check for $12 any questions call me.” Click.

  Mom never wanted to be Barbara Billingsley. Mom got her wish.

  * * *

  What will happen? How will the future play out?

  Well, we’re not going to get more time. But it’s not pretty how it will happen, so if you’re in a good mood, stop reading here and go hug the kids and relax and have a drink and a nice pointless conversation with your spouse.

  Here goes: It has been said that when an idea’s time has come, a lot of people are likely to get it at the same time. In the same way, when something begins to flicker out there in the cosmos, a number of people, a small group at first, begin to pick up the signals. They start to see what’s coming.

  Our entertainment industry, interestingly enough, has plucked something from the unconscious of a small collective. For about 30 years now, but accelerating quickly this decade, the industry has been telling us about The Big Terrible Thing. Space aliens come and scare us, nuts with nukes try to blow us up.

  This is not new: In the ’50s Michael Rennie came from space to tell us in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” that if we don’t become more peaceful, our planet will be obliterated. But now in movies the monsters aren’t coming close, they’re hitting us directly. Meteors the size of Texas come down and take out the eastern seaboard, volcanoes swallow Los Angeles, Martians blow up the White House. The biggest grosser of all time was about the end of a world, the catastrophic sinking of an unsinkable entity.

  Something’s up. And deep down, where the body meets the soul, we are fearful. We fear, down so deep it hasn’t even risen to the point of articulation, that with all our comforts and amusements, with all our toys and bells and whistles… we wonder if what we really have is… a first-class stateroom on the Titanic. Everything’s wonderful, but a world is ending and we sense it.

  I don’t mean: “Uh-oh, there’s a depression coming,” I mean: We live in a world of three billion men and hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs, missiles, warheads. It’s a world of extraordinary germs that can be harnessed and used to kill whole populations, a world of extraordinary chemicals that can be harnessed and used to do the same.

  Three billion men, and it takes only half a dozen bright and evil ones to harness and deploy.

  What are the odds it will happen? Put it another way: What are the odds it will not? Low. Nonexistent, I think.

  When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage… when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries… who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the city that is the psychological center of our modernity, our hedonism, our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.

  If someone does the big, terrible thing to New York or Washington, there will be a lot of chaos and a lot of lines going down, a lot of damage, and a lot of things won’t be working so well anymore. And thus a lot more… time. Something tells me we won’t be teleconferencing and faxing about the Ford account for a while.

  The psychic blow—and that is what it will be as people absorb it, a blow, an insult that reorders and changes—will shift our perspective and priorities, dramatically, and for long
er than a while. Something tells me more of us will be praying, and hard, one side benefit of which is that there is sometimes a quality of stopped time when you pray. You get outside time.

  Maybe, of course, I’m wrong. But I think of the friend who lives on Park Avenue who turned to me once and said, out of nowhere, “If ever something bad is going to happen to the city, I pray each day that God will give me a sign. That He will let me see a rat stand up on the sidewalk. So I’ll know to gather the kids and go.” I absorbed this and, two years later, just a month ago, poured out my fears to a former high official of the United States government. His face turned grim. I apologized for being morbid. He said no, he thinks the same thing. He thinks it will happen in the next year and a half. I was surprised, and more surprised when he said that an acquaintance, a former arms expert for another country, thinks it will happen in a matter of months.

  So now I have frightened you. But we must not sit around and be depressed. “Don’t cry,” Jimmy Cagney once said. “There’s enough water in the goulash already.”

  We must take the time to do some things. We must press government officials to face the big, terrible thing. They know it could happen tomorrow; they just haven’t focused on it because there’s no Armageddon constituency. We should press for more from our foreign intelligence and our defense systems, and press local, state and federal leaders to become more serious about civil defense and emergency management.

  The other thing we must do is the most important.

  I once talked to a man who had a friend who’d done something that took his breath away. She was single, middle-aged and middle class, and wanted to find a child to love. She searched the orphanages of South America and took the child who was in the most trouble, sick and emotionally unwell. She took the little girl home and loved her hard, and in time the little girl grew and became strong, became in fact the kind of person who could and did help others. Twelve years later, at the girl’s high school graduation, she won the award for best all-around student. She played the piano for the recessional. Now she’s at college.

  The man’s eyes grew moist. He had just been to the graduation. “These are the things that stay God’s hand,” he told me. I didn’t know what that meant. He explained: These are the things that keep God from letting us kill us all.

  So be good. Do good. Stay his hand. And pray. When the Virgin Mary makes her visitations—she’s never made so many in all of recorded history as she has in this century—she says: Pray! Pray unceasingly!

  I myself don’t, but I think about it a lot and sometimes pray when I think. But you don’t have to be Catholic to take this advice.

  Pray. Unceasingly. Take the time.

  CHAPTER 9

  I Just Called to Say I Love You

  You know what 9/11 was. It was the thing that changed our lives.

  In the lecture to the Harvard government students a few chapters back, I spoke of those moments in a professional life when you can think: This is why I’m here. The topic that is engaging you is so all consuming to you, so important, so moves your mind and spirit, that your best pours out of you. You only get a few times in your life when that happens, and you usually don’t know you had it until you look back.

  I was acutely aware that in my town, New York, all of us in the days and months after were trying so hard to help, pitching in wherever we could. This was my pitching in. I was talking to the other wounded members of a wounded city. They wrote to me and told me of their experiences, troubles and efforts. Some of what they wrote wound up in my work. To me, in the year or so after 9/11, my work was a communal effort. You don’t get to feel that way too often as a writer working alone. Just remembering it fills my eyes.

  * * *

  His Delicious, Mansard-Roofed World

  Faith, effort and love will get us through this trying time.

  The Wall Street Journal: October 26, 2001

  I found the words on a yellow Post-it I’d stuck on the side of the bookcase in my office about a year ago. It had gotten covered up by phone numbers and pictures and doctors’ appointment cards, and yesterday, looking for a number, I found it—a piece of yellow paper with the words “His delicious mansard-roofed world.” It took me aback. And I remembered what it was.

  That night I had been out with friends—it was last fall—and it was fun, and I got home thinking, simply, of something we all should think of more and I don’t think of enough: how wonderful it is to be alive, the joy of it, the beauty. And as I thought it—this is the part I remember most sharply—a scene came into my mind of a little French town with cobblestone streets and sharply slanting roofs on 18th-century buildings. Which made me think, in turn, in a blink, of New York and its older architecture uptown and off the park, the old mansions off Fifth Avenue with sloping mansard roofs, and how this is the world we live in.

  And I thought at that moment, with those pictures in my head: “His delicious, mansard-roofed world.” He being God. I wrote down the words on a Post-it and put it on the bookcase, thinking some day I’d use them in writing about… something. Maybe joy. Maybe: us. Or maybe I’d just see them and think: That was a nice moment.

  Anyway, the words captured for me a moment of thought.

  And last night I found them and thought: Oh—they speak of a moment in time.

  * * *

  Yesterday afternoon, I was with a teenage friend, taking a cab down Park Avenue. It was a brilliant day, clear and sparkling, and as the cab turned left at 86th Street the sun hit the windows in one of those flashes of bright gold-yellow that can, on certain days or at certain times, pierce your heart. We had been quiet, not talking, on the way to see a friend, when I said, “Do you… find yourself thinking at all of the ways in which you might be feeling differently about the future if September 11th had never happened?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, softly. “Every day.”

  And she meant it. And neither of us said any more and neither of us had to.

  * * *

  There are a lot of quiet moments going on. Have you noticed? A lot of quiet transformations, a lot of quiet action and quiet conversations. People are realigning themselves. I know people who are undergoing religious conversions, and changes of faith. And people who are holding on in a new way, with a harder grip, to what they already have and believe in.

  Some people have quietly come to terms with the most soul-chilling thoughts. A young man I know said to me last week, as we chatted in passing on the street, “I have been thinking about the end of the American empire.” And I thought: Oh, my boy, do you know the import, the weight, of the words you are saying? And then I thought Yes, he does. He’s been thinking, quietly.

  Some people are quietly defining and redefining things. I am one of them. We are trying to define or paint or explain what the old world was, and what the new world is, and how the break between them—the exact spot where the stick broke, cracked, splintered—could possibly have been an hour in early September.

  * * *

  One thing that passes through our minds is what to call the Old World—“The Lost World,” or “The Golden Age” or “Then.” We don’t have to know yet what to call the New World, and cannot anyway because it hasn’t fully revealed itself, and so cannot be named.

  But if we can name the Old World, we’ll at least know exactly what it is we think we’ve lost. And this is a funny little problem, because if you go out onto your street right now, if you live anyplace but downtown Manhattan or Arlington, Va., the world outside looks exactly—exactly—like the one that existed a year ago. The pumpkins in the stores, the merry kids, the guy who owns the butcher shop outside smoking in his apron. Everything looks the same. Same people, same stores, same houses.

  And yet we all feel everything has changed. And we’re right.

  People say things like “We have lost a sense of certainty,” and I nod, for it is true. But on the other hand, I didn’t feel so certain about the future last year. Did you?

  People say we have lost
the assumption that what we had would continue. Or, this being America, get better.

  Certainly people who were carefree have lost their carefreeness. And with no irony I think: That’s a shame. Carefreeness is good.

  * * *

  Lately when I think of the Old World I think of an insult that I mean as a tribute. It is the phrase the narcissism of small differences. In the world that has just passed, careless people—not carefree, careless—spent their time deconstructing the reality of the text, as opposed to reading the book. You could do that then. The world seemed so peaceful that you could actively look for new things to argue about just to keep things lively. You could be on a faculty and argue over where Jane Austen meant to put the comma, or how her landholding father’s contextually objective assumptions regarding colonialism impacted her work. You could have real arguments about stupid things. Those were the days! It’s great when life is so nice you have to invent arguments.

  But the thing I remember as we approached the end of the Old World, the thing I had been thinking for years and marveled over and also felt mildly anxious about, was this: You could go out and order and eat anything in a restaurant. And I had a sense that this wouldn’t last forever, and some day we’d look back on these days fondly.

  I would actually think that. It actually seemed to me marvelous that we could order anything we wanted. Raspberries in February! Bookstores, shoe stores, computer stores, food stores. We could order anything. Www-dot-gimme-dot-com.

  I think the general feeling was a lovely optimism, which was captured in a great ’80s phrase: “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.”