Headaches and Heroes

I felt slightly heroic today when I spent 2 1/2 hours on a bus to get from our campout spot in the Bronx to work.  I felt slightly more heroic when I walked up 17 flights of dark stairs to feed our fish, then 17 flights down with my wind-up flashlight (and we all know how good I am at that!) to go to work.  Then I saw workers pumping rivers of water out of subway stations and read about the people who evacuated NYU Medical Center's patients using slides down 8 flights of stairs.  There's heroic and there's Heroic.

Tonight it took me almost as long to return to our Bronx campout, with a pounding headache (probably caused by my trying to make up my lateness to work by not picking up coffee and eating only protein bars and chocolate pudding all day).  Then I thought about buildings full of toilets that won't flush and handymen who will be cleaning up debris for days and bus drivers who have to stay alert for those 2 1/2 hour trips that I half-sleep through.  There are headaches and there are Headaches.

I wish this could be like a soap opera town, where once the natural disaster has done its ratings job for sweeps, the town looks as though nothing ever happened (though I saw first-hand how many crew Heroes it took to make that illusion).  The recovery here will last a lot longer, and I suspect that the memories of both the heroes and the Heroes, the headaches and the Headaches will last a lifetime.