10 years younger than I actually was. Two days is a long timewithout sudden movements, without speaking more than a few words at a time, and without going outside. How was I going to break? I broke with a lecture on lawns and obedience, my plate of steaming eggplant lasagna rocketed into our kitchen wall, my lips shouting, "Who gives a fuck," my bare feet driving themselves over the hardwood floors on their way to the front door, my hands violently clutching at the nylon American flag hanging from our porch, and my arms flinging it across the freshly mowed lawn as I began my walk to Godknowswhere, "Keep walking, Son” shouted out behind me, a desperate and unnecessary message of encouragement.

A month later, wandering among the huge sandstone gardens of Arches National Park, in Southern Utah, I found myself alone in a maze of smooth and rust colored monoliths. But it wasn't enough. In the brilliance of the noontime sun, I prayed wordlessly that the ground could soften for a moment. I wanted to sink down into the rock; I wanted to lie down and die, be absorbed, be shaped by the wind just as the arches are. The desert did that to me. Its age has a way of humbling, of beckoning. Try riding west on a motorcycle at dusk, over the straight and vacant highways of Nevada. You watch the sunset for two uninterrupted hours. The barren landscape lapses into pure color. You ride into increasing abstraction, and feel like It might finally happen. Then it turns to night, and it's time to find a campsite in the dark.

After drifting in my bare feet for several hours, I walked back through the front door. Maybe if I’d had shoes on, I

Plane crashes into Tower B, view from the West.
            Da dum, da dum, da dum, da dum
            ... ..., ... ..., ... ..., ... ...

My mom must have realized it wasn't good for me, all that TV and a deteriorating level of response to outside stimulus. Sometime in the afternoon of September 13th, she asked me to mow the lawn, probably just to get me outside. I heard her, and muttered a response; but like everything else in those two days, it was perceived and processed at a distance, regulated to a cold white room in the hallways of my mind while the rest were filled with newsflash images, and the dull sound of stagnation. I muttered a response I do not remember from the plush cushions of the couch, and as I watched the rippling effects of those images spread out across the world, neatly packaged on network television, I vaguely began to foster a hatred for the idea of a well‑manicured lawn.

Hours later I was surprised to see my dad through the window next to the television, pushing our fireengine-red mower across the backyard. I didn't even know that he had come home.

Dinnertime in the Midwest. In summer the sun is low on the horizon and streams into our kitchen in a warm yellow flood. A time in the American heartland to sit down and be American. My family always turns the television off at mealtime, and in those news ­frenzied days the silence felt irresponsible. At the table, Mom, Dad, and I sat, and did our best to ignore the soundlessness. That evening my dad wanted to talk about lawns, about the importance of mowing them, about the importance of listening to parents, and to remind me that I was