You Know Your Number’s Up

Working and living in the city, it’s not unusual to have noteworthy events take place near you. Oftentimes, they merely arouse your interest and perhaps provoke a remark or two. I think there is a general tendency to become inured to tragedy or outrageousness when you hear about it everyday; you tend to view this news item or that as perhaps being somewhat out of the commonplace, and then dismiss it from your mind several minutes later when the discussion dies down. I try sometimes to mentally cast myself in the role of the victim or some other participant in a catastrophe to give the importance of the event the regard it deserves. I succeed often enough when it try that, but custom does have a way of dulling compassion. One might even argue we can’t allow ourselves to feel every calamity we hear about to the fullest — how could we function after all? — as perhaps a physician must, to a degree, harden himself to suffering in order to concentrate more effectively on the task of relieving that suffering.

However emotionally constituted you are, there will occur from time to time an event that annihilates indifference. For me, it often isn’t the totality of the event but the features of it that get me. For instance, when I consider the sheer enormity of 9/11, my mind often goes to the shots of people jumping from impossible heights in a last ditch effort to save themselves from a smoking skyscraper, or the account of a rescue worker who discovered a single human leg, a young female’s, daintily clad in a pink sock and black shoe, and how he used that image to spur him on, dedicating his energies to his conception of that poor, anonymous woman who so recently had a full life ahead of her.

Last Monday a great commotion took place near the office. The sound of sirens (which is by no means unusual) was more multiplied and strident than ordinary as numerous emergency vehicles converged from all parts of the city to a spot some eight or ten blocks away. Four or five helicopters beat the air up above us and there was, as they say, a distinct buzz in the air. Something was going on.

John H. (whom I call the Internet Detective, because he’s the fastest Googler alive) quickly discovered what had happened: scaffolding from a construction project across the street from the Boston Common had detached itself from a building (workers were dismantling it at the time) and came crashing down to the busy street below. Two masonry workers were killed in the accident, and stories later came out about the many passersby and motorists who miraculously escaped death or serious injury by inches. But one poor guy, a young doctor sitting in traffic, was crushed to death in his car.

What are the odds of that? You’re on your way to work, idling in a line of cars waiting for the light to change, listening to the radio and taking a sip of your cup of joe, when suddenly, whammo! a piece of scaffolding falls from the sky and instantly ends your earthly existence. No personal reckoning of your life, no last words to your loved ones, no time consider your prospects for the afterlife. Your candle is snuffed out without the slightest warning. As 80 Hour Man later so eloquently put it: “You know your number’s up when that happens.”

That, my friends, got to me.