So our comment count has almost caught up with our posting count. Just a bit of trivia.
I was just grading papers. Not really grading but reading and commenting. I don’t grade until they’ve had 2 or 3 chances at it. I’m tired of reading papers now. They are early and they are not so great. When my students comment or respond to prompts like, “next week you are going to teach the class. Tell me what you will keep and what you will change,” they are very interesting and candid. But when they respond to an assignment like, ” What is your core passion,” they are stilted and repetative. I guess it’s hard to think sometimes.
Anyway, Davin’s post about 9-11 didn’t get any response so I thought I’d throw my 2 cents in.
I was reading Plato (for school, clearly) and I had just gotten Lila to nap and off the phone with another mommy friend (Sarah Jackson, the greatest, she shook up the world, she shook up the world). Sarah called me back. I was a little annoyed because I had just told her that I needed to read this ultra boring book for class that night. But when she said, “We’re under attack,” I found that both hard to believe and alarming, becuase Sarah is not an alarmist.
I turned on the TV. And said, “come over. right now.” We hung up the phone, I think, because it rang again soon after. Kim Felcher was on the line. We were in awe and quiet desperation (the kids were still sleeping, mind). Have you ever been on the phone with someone and not talked but you cannot hang up. Finally, we decided on Lunch. If we have to be miserable, we’ll do it together, doggone it!
So the mommy’s came over and the kids played and slept and played and slept. We may have made a concession toward Sesame Street at some point but the news reigned the day. I don’t know if you can imagine having infant children, living 1/2 mile from an airport with phone lines jammed and husbands working and being alone. We could not imagine it. and so we did not endure it. The mommies were over for hours until we could go home and feel confident that we could do mom amidst this terror.
Sarah’s husband worked for the newspaper. I don’t know when he got home that night.
We have a collective history that, because of media most of the world shares. But the interesting point is where our individual history intersects with the collective. Believe it or not we are not all living the same life. Where were you?
One response to “intersections”
I was at work that day. The new kid told me that someone had crashed a plane into the World Trade Center. My first thought was, “what is the World Trade Center?” My second thought was, “boy, some pilot must have really screwed up.” But then we all soon realized what was happening. We were encouraged to go home and be with our families.
I stayed and caught up on my filing. I was just so numb that all I could think of doing was something routine, something mundane. Maybe it was a subconscious defense mechanism to keep me from absorbing the reality of it all.
Mike was home sick and watched the news the entire day. When I got home we hugged and cried but I could not watch the news. They just kept replaying the crashes over and over.
My mom still remembers in vivid detail the day JFK was killed. I thought about that a lot on 9/11, that I would probably be telling my children about that day. It was horrific. A day we will all probably never forget.