What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [67]
She did and joined millions of Americans watching in horror as video images of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were played and replayed. The devastation in New York was still unfolding. As she watched the Twin Towers collapse, she felt anger. Then she felt bewildered and helpless. She had always been a pillar of strength for Jason, but when they spoke again she could not contain the anguish that had mounted throughout the day as she witnessed the desolation. “I tried to comfort her,” Jason said. “She just kept asking, ‘What can I do?’ ”
She kept asking the question of herself over and over in the days that followed as she watched the repeating footage of the hijacked jet-liners slicing across silent blue skies and plunging into the twin office towers, of the buildings collapsing into the world they once dwarfed, and of thousands of panicked people fleeing cascading debris and clouds of toxic smoke billowing through the streets of lower Manhattan. When she failed to answer her own question, a woman of strong Baptist faith, she turned her thoughts to God for an answer.
The attack punctuated Loretta’s already growing sense of unease at what was happening to the once close-knit rural world she had known her whole life. So much had changed. So much was changing. It was not just Loretta’s perception. The small towns between the St. Lawrence River and the Adirondacks were being hollowed out year after year by economic decline.
For nearly half a century, the area’s dairy farmers—unable to survive on the puny prices paid for milk—had been selling out to the big dairies or just closing. It was true that more milk was being produced, but more barns and farm buildings were collapsing in disuse. More people had forfeited their work on the land. At the same time, St. Lawrence County’s manufacturing industries and its former importance as a source of minerals were rapidly fading. The paper mill in Newton’s Falls had shut down in 2000. A decade earlier the town’s iron ore mill shut its doors. The zinc and talc mines in Gouverneur were laying off workers, too, and heading toward their various demises by the end of the decade. The crossroads communities, the pockets of communal life that once surrounded the small schoolhouses, such as in Richville where Loretta grew up, had been vanishing ever since the centralization of the schools. There just was no reason any longer for folks to congregate as neighbors as they once did, for a tree planting on Arbor Day or a Christmas recital before winter break.
So it was that there was a certain nostalgia that arose when the old daydream flashed through Loretta’s mind. Once again, she imagined herself at work in the diner across Route 11 from her house, serving home-cooked food and talking to people who came there as to an old-fashioned haven.
It was hardly the first time she had daydreamed about it. From time to time, she had nursed this fantasy since the diner first opened in 1957. Loretta was then a pretty but shy strawberry-haired sixteen-year-old who worked as a waitress at the Silver Leaf. She served some of its first customers. Over the years, she had seen its name and owners change and watched as it went neglected and its popularity declined. She had hoped to restore the feeling it once had.
But she never had quite that much time, energy, or ambition. After all, she had a pretty full life, with much else to concern her.
Not long after the diner opened, she had gone on her first date with Paul, who picked her up in his father’s Model T Ford. They went to see a movie at Grayland Movie Theater in Gouverneur and afterward went for a sundae at the Crystal Palace ice cream stand, where she also sometimes worked. After graduating from high school, she prepared to go to nursing school. But on Christmas Day 1950 Paul proposed, and they were married at her parents’ house the following June. They borrowed a car, and, in one of the very few trips they ever took, they honeymooned