Bitter and Sweet in August

I started to write “Bittersweet Days of August” but “bittersweet” is just not a strong enough word for what I’m feeling right now. After a wonderful visit the kidlets got home safely yesterday and my focus went to the bridge collapse. One blogger wrote “our city now has a hole in its heart” and that’s exactly how I feel. My beautiful Minneapolis has a massive wound right on the river that birthed it. As the kids and I played with Bella in the backyard or had breakfast at Cooqi (a gluten-free bakery) I could hear the not-so-distant buzz of helicopters up the river from us. I found that it didn’t really matter if I watched the press conferences or not…that information would be available to me online or in multiple replays on TV in the coming days. And phone calls and emails had confirmed that my local family and friends were all ok. Still every time I crossed the street bridges over the Mississippi (which I do several times a day) my thoughts were not about my own safety but about the tragedy 5 miles upriver from me.
When we went through airport security yesterday, we all had to remove our shoes, including Hayden and her bright pink Crocs. Brennan had bought a small snow globe for his younger sister, which got picked up by the sensors (it was considered a fluid). As a result we were kindly and politely escorted back to ticketing so we could check his bag. Both events were small reminders of what happens after a tragedy (or near tragedy). Someone puts a bomb in their shoe and we all have to remove our shoes when we go through airport security for years to come. We scramble to institute measures to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.
And now, as the recovery efforts at the bridge wear on and the number of missing (fortunately) has decreased to eight, the media talk turns to our country’s infrastructure and what we need to do to be sure that this doesn’t happen again .
But my question is not so much “why have we ignored this for so long,” but “why do we lack the imagination to see problems (like shoe bombs and falling bridges) before they happen in the first place?”