11-11-11

At 11 o’clock in the morning alarms throughout the city rang.  I was in an office building lobby waiting for a meeting to start when the fire alarm sounded and everything got quiet.  Because at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the entire city pauses for a full two minutes in honor and memory of veterans.

Veteran’s Day isn’t quite the same in the States.  There are people selling Poppies, but here in England the poppy appeal is quite broad with veterans young and old selling them everywhere, at the underground, the stop lights, on the bridge to work.  There was a bit of a row (that’s British speak) here when FIFA, the football organizing body, at first would not, and then did, allow England football players to wear a poppy logo for their game against Spain on Saturday.

While it is a Federal Holiday in the US, schools are no longer closed, like they once were, and most offices are open for business, as are the world stock markets.

The two minutes of silence was interesting in part because it wasn’t a moment, but a full two minutes.  That length of silence can be off-putting.  All I could hear was the drip of the waterfall in the office lobby.  Everyone either stood or sat, looking off somewhere in the distance, not down at their Blackberrys.  Cell phones rang and beeped and let out other burps of noise, but everyone took it very seriously.   The Brits, who oppose most formality and public displays of emotion, took this with a depth that surprised me.

And when it was over, it was as if a game of Simon Says had ended and everybody began moving about, carrying on, the two minutes had passed.

In our house 11-11 always meant my mom’s birthday.  On 11-11-11 it means her 70^th.