September

For those who are worried that I seem to have gone under ground, all is well here. Dr. Boy is back, things are good, it's just that this is the busy time of the year at work, and so I'm not able to really do much else.

A few quick thoughts on 9/11. First, I think PDP sums up the experience of living in NYC on 9/11 really well here. I had a really strange day this year, because I'm back at a school, just as I was on 9/11/01. On that day, EKK and I were sharing an office and listening to the radio when we heard about a plane hitting the WTC. We thought it was a joke, or some idiot, but nothing important. When the second plane hit, we were first confused about whether they were reporting the same story or a new one. Our phones weren't able to call friends in NYC, our internet news was down... the rest of the day is a blur. I remember that Mobes brought in her TV, but now I have trouble piecing together what I learned when.

I replay the day in my head each year, and EKK and I have an annual ritual of checking in. Now, the trouble that I had with cell phones reminds me of Katrina. What a difference a few years makes.

7 years later, I work at a school with 3 survivor children. I often wonder how the rest of the country deals with 9/11, because I've always been somewhere that had to deal with children who lost their fathers, and adults who lost their friends. What ust this be like when the geography and people are just abstractions? I had a conference call with the class that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in memory of their buddy. It was surreal. Here I was on the phone with a guy who spent months in NYC searching for his best friend who called from the Towers to say, "I can't get out, take care of my family, I love you." Seven years later, he's kept his promise to do just that, but now that conversation is part of some great national excercise in grief. It gets reprinted in newspapers, and seems totally unrelated to the quiet, grieving man on the phone who lost his best friend since the 4th grade.

That night, Dr. Boy and I were turning out the lights in the living room, and I realized for the first time, that we could see the Towers of Light. Every 9/11, they light beams to reproduce the WTC, and I saw that we would have had a view of the towers from our home. And, how close we really are to Ground Zero. I can do the math - less than 5 miles. Less than 5 miles, and seven years later.