We watched football last night. (well, I read during football)
5 years ago
My children were 9 and 7 and were already at school that morning. My dear Brooklyn girlfriend had arrived at my house for our morning exercise time. I was bouncing on my mini-trampoline and she was on the treadmill. (We were listening to Wiseguys, Put Your Body in Motion, funny the details you remember) We alternated tramp, bike, treadmill to our odd mix tape of rock and rap and, well everything. We had worked up a sweat when her cell phone rang. My girlfriend has a far more colorful vocabulary than mine and she stopped the treadmill and starting shouting into the phone: “You’re a fucking asshole!” “That is not funny!” This continued for a minute or so. Finally her friend in NY convinced her she was not an asshole and she wasn’t kidding. We walked to my living room and turned on the television.
I never changed the channel because the first one had the smoking towers. There were still two. I called my mother. She was in upstate New York and she had reached my 3 siblings, but hadn’t been able to get through to me. It was good to hear her voice. My next door neighbor came over and sat down on the couch with us without saying anything. We hugged. We held hands. We were too stunned to even wipe the tears from our faces. We stayed on the couch in our sweaty workout clothes until we picked up the kids from school.
My husband was in a business meeting. I kept leaving him voice messages. Everyone else in the meeting kept getting voice messages. Finally they thought something must be up and they listened to their messages.
My girlfriend wanted to go to school and pick up the kids. I told her we couldn’t do that. We had to have control over our emotions before we saw our children. I was 9 years old when John F. Kennedy was shot. I was in Catholic school at the time. The nuns were sobbing. When I got home my mother was sobbing. She told me that things would never be the same in my country. All I could think about was that my son was 9 and his world had just changed forever. He would feel the same confusing disruption in his world that I felt in mine. All the adults in his world would be crying. He would remember the day like it was yesterday decades later. I couldn’t imagine how my 7 year old would feel. I didn’t want to either.
I drove to school at the usual time to pick up the boys. I asked what they had been told. The teachers had told them that there would be no school the next day because something bad had happened. Their parents would explain it to them. I told them briefly what had happened. I told them it was important. There was always a debate in the car for who got to chose radio station. I pushed all the buttons to demonstrate to them how there was no music today. There was nothing except the horrible tragedy that had happened to our country.
We made it through the day. Brendon cancelled the rest of his business trip and drove home. My strongest memory is my dear friend cursing up a storm at her friend that called with the news. It couldn’t be true. It had to be a sick joke. Then the sadness in the knowledge that of all the wonderful things that happened in 2001 my little boys would have one clear memory. The day all the big people in their life cried.