Chaos September 11

September 11, 2001.

I was at school teaching. Meg, then 16, was in high school. Jenny was just 3, and at home with her dad, while I was at work teaching art at the same school that my other two children- Peter and Becca- went to.

I remember crowding into the pre-K classroom with other teachers watching footage as the WTC was obliterated. It seemed unreal, and honestly I don’t think I processed it.

The uncertainty continued with the anthrax scare. Five people died because of that. We began wondering what was in the back of that unmarked panel truck we saw heading down the street, and reported packages left by empty seats to the mall police.

We were afraid – to laugh, to celebrate, to live.

This was the thing. Now we speak about the attack on the World Trade Center, and on the Pentagon- of a striking out against globalism, the United States, and the Bush regime. Then, we did not have any sort of framing to put it into context. We didn’t know what was happening next- or even what was happening then. The information that we received was fraught with assumption and speculation, most of it contradictory.

Bush was not accurate on a lot of counts in this speech, and we know what was orchestrated after. But he was right about the feeling of chaos. We began closely watching the news, hesitating when planes went overhead, wondering if we should open mail.

So that is what I remember the most. The day itself was strange and unsettling, and the only thought that I had was, “What will happen next? Should I pick up my daughter at high school? Should we be together?” It was after, when you were wondering if the plane overhead was being piloted by a copy-cat who wanted to cause more turmoil by flying it randomly into a school- uncertainty, uncertainty.

We become acclimated to a certain amount of death around us. We know when we get married that one spouse will likely outlive the other. When we conceive a child, we pray and pray and pray that ours won’t be one of the small percentage in this country that doesn’t live to adulthood. But we can live with it. When it seems that the tables are tipping- that the statistics are moving in a different direction- the fear that death will strike your home is pervasive.

Navigating life day to day in uncertain enough.  There are all sorts of variables that will disrupt even the most structured of lives – the hot water heater goes, you wake up to a flat tire, cancer. Control is truly an illusion. September 11 reminded me of how true this is, when the what-ifs of life crowded in and I – and the rest of the country – watched the sky for danger.

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