Where have all the young men gone, long time passing?
Where have all the young men gone, long time ago?
Where have all the young men gone? Gone to soldiers, every one.
When will they ever learn? Oh when will they ever learn?
                  -- Bob Dylan
                      "Blowin' in the Wind"

Jay Leno, in his first show after The Tragedy, said that on the morning of September 11 his biggest concern was whether or not Anne Heche was crazy. Someone on a list I read said she couldn't remember what the major stories were in her local paper that day. I couldn't either. Our recycling pickup is tomorrow, and before I put out two weeks' worth of newspapers yesterday I checked the mindset of central Pennsylvania that gorgeous morning.

The Old Farmer's Almanac was predicting a mild winter with no big snowstorms and just one real cold snap in mid-January. Police were investigating the death of a youngster who suffered internal injuries when the carnival roller coaster he was riding in stopped too quickly. A dead crow in a township just across the river from our neighborhood was determined to have the West Nile virus, and a young woman from our township won a brand new Mitsubishi because she kept her lips pressed to it for a total of 25 hours.

And on the front page was a story about a the Civil War Soldiers & Sailors System, a website that lists the service records of those who fought in that conflict. The story was illustrated with a file photo of a Civil War re-enactor portraying a fallen infantryman in a staging of the Battle of Little Round Top at Gettysburg last July.

War as a spectator sport. Pretending to go into battle and to kill or be killed as a form of entertainment. That's what people in my town were reading on the front page of the paper while unsuspecting passengers were boarding four flights that would not get them where they thought they were going.

Yesterday I turned once again to serious work on my fiction. I'd hired a private tutor in August, but had to defer work or produce very little from the valuable suggestions and feedback he was giving me first because of my surgery and then because of my inability to focus last week. ("Near death experience, acts of war ... it's always something!" I wrote to him, the survivor in me using wry humor to cope.)

My novel is not a Civil War novel, it's a family saga, but the Battle of Gettysburg and its aftermath are central to establishing the relationship between my main character and the man she marries. In one scene my main character Ellen, acting as servant girl and companion to the wealthy Lydia, accompanies her to Gettysburg to help care for Lydia's fiance Benjamin and her brother William, the man Ellen will marry, who have both been wounded.

Yesterday I turned to a resource I've had for a long time but never consulted before. Debris of Battle: The Wounded of Gettysburg, by Gerard A. Patterson, is about "those who came to help and those coming to search: wives, mothers, and fathers not knowing for certain if their wounded loved ones were still alive..." I read the chapter called "A Second Invasion," about the hordes of relatives who descended on the town in the days following the battle, as well as the morticians and the relic hunters and the profiteers and the just plain curious.

It was the smell, I learned, that hit people first as they got off the trains, a smell of decay that overwhelmed and sickened even hardy farm girls like Ellen who'd helped her father bury a whole herd of hogs that fell victim to a disease.

The smell, and the shoes.

Exactly what our friend Tim told us. He's an urban firefighter who gave a period of service last week at Ground Zero in New York. The smell, he said, and the shoes. So many shoes.

For the first time since That Day, I cried.

I wrote the scene, mailed it to my tutor, and then went to pick up Lynn after hockey practice. As I drove onto the campus I noticed that the flag was blowing in the wind at full staff, as the President has ordered. I took a deep breath, and decided to move forward once again.