Life is starting to get back to “normal,” although there is still a lot of tension and unease. I have been sleeping better, but my dreams are still unsettled. The weather has been beautiful and the leaves are turning, so it is possible to forget about all of this at least for a little while. Last Sunday, when Lisa and I were hiking Little Monadnock in New Hampshire, it was wonderful — it was only afterward that I realized I hadn’t been thinking about the terror.

We still talk about it a lot at work. Mostly we wonder about what the immediate future will bring, how we will respond militarily, whether our foreign policy will change for the better. [On the political discussion forum] everyone rallies around the flag but disagrees over typical issues: whether we should understand the terrorists, whether we should hit back in a local or broadbased strike, whether we were partially to blame, whether retaliation causes us to cede the moral high ground. In short, the right and left argue about whether US cultural imperialism or a culture of cruelty caused the provocative actions which we now find ourselves trying to answer. The peace folks say we should turn the other cheek; the vengeful don’t seem to care about innocents abroad. . . .

Today after work we noticed a large to-do at the funeral home just across the street from our apartment. The crowd numbered more than we had ever seen there, and included mostly Asians, some of whom were dressed in foreign military uniforms. We couldn’t think of who it might be until I remembered reading Nguyen Van Thieu’s obituary in Monday’s Times. It is rather bizarre to think that a deposed despot — he was the last president of South Viet Nam and took power in a coup — lived one town over in Brookline and was eulogized next door to us. It is, upon reflection, a rather interesting link between the present and this nation’s last open-ended war.

Tomorrow we are off to Canada!