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I'll bet it happened a lot in those dark days just after the attacks. Could well be all the more reason why so many don't like to talk very much about those days as well.
Ours was a totally serious relationship, begun via the Net, moved to real life, he even flew across the pond to spend a "fortnight" with me in February 2001. His previously slightly shrill anti-American-government stance (he said, as so many Europeans do, that he never held what our govt did against the American people) was tempered when he was here because he saw things he had never expected on his first trip to the U.S.
This is a worldly wise guy of almost 60 who had worked for the BCD (British Civil Defence, ask your wife about that organisation) for almost 30 years. He had extreme disaster rescue skills and certifications, worked both of the Yorkshire floods and too many disasters out of the UK to count. He was great in earthquakes, qualified as a "tunnel rat" to enter pancaked buildings that had collapsed and trapped living people and bodies that had to be gotten out. So he worked in Turkey, Iran, Iraq following quakes there. He had so many stamps on his passport it was a mosaic. He'd been to (he estimated) maybe 20 countries over the years. He worked the famine/war scene in Rwanda in 1994 -- his worst assignment and his longest, providing clean drinking water to an orphanage in the middle of the war. The orphanage also sheltered women and elderly men who were sick or injured. Many had been wounded by the factions fighting, even though they were non-combatants. Rod's team was even shot at when they would transport their water cleaning machine to the nearest water hole some miles away from the orphanage to fill it up. Well-fed young "warriors" would wait in ambush for them there, knowing they could force them to give the clean water to THEM if they could catch them. Rod's team went prepared, however, and armed, so they were always able to get their precious machine and the clean water it could provide back to the orphanage.
The BCD team remained in Rwanda for six weeks, Rod's longest stint at a disaster site. It was so physically and emotionally draining for him he wrote in his personal log on the plane on the way back to the UK: NEVER AGAIN! Underlined several times.
He did continue with rescue work, however -- just not the sort he encountered in Rwanda. How many people do you know who would go so far as my Roderick to practice what he preached about caring for the world?
Yet this same man had such an anti-American attitude when I met him I could hardly talk with him. If we hadn't had other reasons to like each other and persist in trying to communicate, we'd never have made it very far past "Where you from?" ;-)
But we fell in love and he hopped on a plane to Tulsa in February 2001 -- and was totally amazed at what America was REALLY like, down at the heartland, grassroots, real life level where I live. We ate at a Route 66 diner in midtown Tulsa and he loved the chow so much we went back there at least ten times during his two week stay! Apparently British food leaves something to be desired.
I took him into the outlying areas from Tulsa where I'd lived a lot of my life, into the rural and lake country. We even spent five days and nights in a lake cabin originally built by the WPA back in the 30's! It was glorious, even if it was winter. The weather was deliciously mild when we arrived yet it snowed lightly on us the day we pulled out from the cabin. I drove him around that area, where I had lived when I was 19 and 20 years old. My folks had put a mobile home on a small acreage after my dad retired from the Highway Patrol, and down those country roads (unpaved, but passable most days) were the homely shacks, mobile homes, and tin-reinforced dwellings of truly poor people. Yet they weren't even aware for the most part that they populated the "below poverty level" end of the economic spectrum ... I know because I was one of 'em.
Rod was completely shocked. Stunned. Smart as he was, wise even, he had NO IDEA that there were poor people in America! That may be overstating it just slightly, but he certainly was not prepared for what he saw down those rural Oklahoma roads. I asked him did he think all of us drove BMW's and lived in mansions? Of course he didn't, but it's amazing at the misperceptions so many around the world have about us Americans....
By the time he flew back to the UK, our plans to get married were firm. One of us would have to relocate, as a marriage across the big pond just would NOT do. We were prepared to go that far to be together.
Then September 11th happened ... and after his first instinctive desire to "bounce" out on a disaster rescue mission to help the firefighters and medical people at Ground Zero, Rod began to rant at the USA as he had done when we first met. Before he got to know this American lady really well and learn the truth about what the USA is like. From a positive, upbeat point of view -- mine -- that is.
I was in what could only be called shock for a full seven days after 9-11. I'm a TV news junkie and some days watched cable news networks all day, so doing that from the Tuesday of the attacks until the following Tuesday was not an "unusual" behavior for me. I was glued to the TV set, could hardly bear to walk the dog, afraid I'd miss some important breaking news.
I couldn't eat; couldn't sleep worth a damn; couldn't carry on a normal conversation with friends or family. I stayed in bed and wanted to pull the covers over my head and make the world go away. At the end of the week post 9-11, I had a nightmare that was the mother of all nightmares. (And I've had them all my life, stemming from a history of childhood abuse.) I dreamed I was in a small mountain village in some third world country, at night, wandering around looking for Rod while the village was being bombed. I couldn't find Rod, and the people I encountered were scareder than I was. It was bloody, gory, and truly apocalyptic.
I woke up shaking and falling apart, went to a neighbor friend's apartment and she talked me down, gave me a Valium. After that, I began to pull out of the dive I'd been in, which was potentially suicidal. But things were never the same between Rod and me after that time. Even while I was trying to get my head around the horrors of 9-11 and the backlash that came at Americans (after the compassion that was expressed first), Rod was joining in the attack, accusing the U.S. of vile doings in the world (not unjustified in all cases but I couldn't take it just then). Our relationship deteriorated very quickly until he happened to be diagnosed with cancer and just dropped out of sight almost overnight.
You could say it was the diagnosis that caused our breakup, but I know the truth: it was the discord and pain over 9-11.
*Whew* Haven't told that story in a long time. Guess I needed to or I wouldn't have spilled it here. Thanks for listening.
.... Guess I'll always be just an all-American girl....
P.S. I'm a singer/songwriter too, and I wrote a couple of really good songs after 9-11 that I never sing. Just remembered that ... strange.
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