Ending 2001 United but Weary

I’m sitting here looking out the window at an overcast sky and thinking that I should’ve taken the week off. I don’t feel like working, and neither does anyone else in the family.

The dog is lying on his back with his eyes closed and his paws in the air, smiling slightly and dreaming of a pot roast. He looks like a demented Snoopy.

I can hear my wife in the other room watching a movie on television. I think it’s something with Gene Hackman in it. Everything has Gene Hackman in it. The year 2001 was the Year of Gene Hackman.

She is usually bustling about during the day, doing this and doing that. It is the nature of women to bustle about. It has to do with the glands. But not today. Today she is watching Gene Hackman.

Nobody feels like doing anything this afternoon. Not my wife, not the dog and not me. I suspect that in the utility room where they sleep, our other live-in animals, Cat One and Cat Two, are similarly in a state of ennui.

Not that cats ever truly relax. They are always only half-asleep, like Marines on foxhole duty, ready for whatever is about to pounce on them. I got pounced upon by a rabbit one night while I was on foxhole watch during the Korean War.

It came out of nowhere and whammo! it was on me. I thought it was the 223rd Chinese Infantry Brigade. I fired my .45 automatic but missed. No one in all the history of modern military endeavor has ever hit anything with a .45.

But I haven’t slept a full night since. I’m still half-alert, waiting for the rabbit to return.

It isn’t just the exhaustion of the holiday season that has me all bummed out. It’s the whole year. And now on the last day of 2001, I am trying to let go of the trauma that has kept me, and you too, teetering on the brink.

Talk about chaotic times.

Everything was humming along pretty well for most of 2000 and then suddenly it all fell apart. I think it started with the voting confusion in Miami, which leaked over, so to speak, into 2001. We began this year not really sure who the president was. Not the best way to stagger into the millennium.

Then the economy went to hell, Tom left Nicole, Gray Davis sold California to the power companies, Little Jimmy Hahn proved that you don’t have to be quick or articulate to be the mayor of L.A., and the world of Maxwell Smart became a reality.

You remember Max. He was the secret agent in the old TV comedy series “Get Smart” who was always being pursued by foreign spies trying to zap him in various imaginative ways. Once they placed a bomb in a snack truck, but Smart was on to them. “Ah-ha,” he said wisely, “the old bomb in the snack truck trick.”

I thought of that when they caught Richard Reid with the bombs in the heels of his suede sneakers. I realize it wasn’t a comedic situation, but I couldn’t help but visualize Don Adams, who played Maxwell Smart, looking at the shoe and saying, “Ah-ha, the old bomb in the suede shoe trick!”

What’s next in the surreal world we occupy? The old bomb in the bra trick?

2001.

It was a year that sobered us. That changed us. That tested the deepest core of our convictions. That aged us.

Sept. 11.

Suddenly, nothing else seemed important. We cried, we screamed, we cursed, we shook our fists at God, we roared our hatreds toward a religion we didn’t understand and a people we didn’t even know.

But then we remembered who we were. We emerged slowly through the dust that lingered in the air over the twin towers, hurting but whole. And we came to realize that Islam wasn’t our enemy and the whole of the Arab world wasn’t our enemy.

Osama bin Laden, like evil men before him, had mesmerized an element of followers into believing that horror was the will of Allah and murder of the innocents the way to salvation.

So we went after him and the men he recruited and the government that sheltered him. And now a nation is free again and its women human again, and we hunt Bin Laden over the hills and into caves as dark as the hell he has created.

Rumors abound. He’s in Africa. In Saudi Arabia. In Oakland. (Oakland?) Or maybe he’s already dead. Who will be the first to see him with Elvis Presley at the Beverly Center?

Oh, the year. That year. We emerged united, determined and maybe, well, just a bit muddled. Airport security personnel missed a shoe bomb but confiscated nail clippers. We let a crazy-eyed ex-con aboard a jetliner but refused a Secret Service agent who guards the president of the United States.

But, hey, that’s just us. That’s just good people doing the best we can. That’s just the often clumsy, occasionally awkward conduct of a free society adjusting to new peril.

Me? I’ll adjust later. Maybe now I’ll just take a little nap. Me and the demented dog, lying on a rug, our paws in the air, dreaming of a pot roast floating by.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Monday and Thursday. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.