911

They say All Americans know what they were doing that morning.  My memories are here:  a new teacher, a worried mother and a robotic urge to continue...

It was the first week of school, and my first year of having a classroom all to myself (I was the “teacher” after spending years as a teachers' aide).  I had spent the summer getting  ready to host young gifted and talented kids, all who would call my classroom home for the coming year. 

That morning my own kids, Vince and Alicia, were getting ready for school and I was trying to not be late.  I had been getting ready in my room as quickly as possible, thinking of all the things I had to do that morning.  I had agreed give Justin, another student whose mother worked downtown, a ride to school.  I was busy thinking how I would get my two teenagers mobile, loaded into our van, and pick up Justin - and stay on schedule.

Somehow we were all  were in the van on time and as we made our way to Justin’s, we were fairly silent.  

Mornings have never been a chatty time for me - even after two cups of coffee.

My phone rang and I answered it – it was Mario. 

“Where are you?” he asked. He sounded panicked. 

“On my way to pick up Justin,” I said.  

"Pull over," he said.  My first thought was that maybe one of our grown children was in trouble, or had been hurt.   My second thought was that he was being called out to some riot or skirmish (he had a high-profile job with the Department of Justice).

“Are you pulled over?”

"Yes!"

 By the looks on their faces, Vince and Alicia could hear what their dad was saying.  They were attentive to his voice on the other end of my small cell phone, since he was speaking so loudly.

“Okay,” I said as my van idled on a random corner that overlooked the back of Justin’s house. 

“The World Trade Center has been hit,” he said.  I didn't understand the magnitude of what he was saying.  Hit?  How?  My ears started ringing. Mario’s parents lived in New York City.  I thought of their safety, but I needed to know more….

“How?” I asked. 

“A plane crashed into the North Tower and then another one crashed into the South Tower,” he said.  

"A plane crash?"

"It was purposeful..."

A flash of information fluttered like confetti  in my mind: Attack. Terrorism.

There had been a similar attack a few years before- the WTC was targeted by Muslim extremists and a car bomb failed to bring the tower down.  The Jewish Banking System’s capital was there and things had been heating up between the oil dependent USA and the oil providing Middle East.   

I could hear a commotion from Mario's side of the phone, and he gasped.  “Both Towers have collapsed.”

Collapsed?

What did that mean? 

I felt slapped in the face, but I faced the kids, who were looking at me.  “The World Trade Center was hit by two airplanes,” I said. 

“And the Pentagon,” Alicia said.  She knew something I didn’t and the news didn’t seem as surprising to her. 

“What!?” I asked, panic now in my voice.  Mario was still in my ear on my phone.  “The Pentagon, too?”  I asked both of them. 

“YES!” Mario said.  “The Pentagon, too.”  HE was distracted – I could tell he was watching news reports – probably with others in his office.    

“Were you watching TV this morning?” I asked Alicia.  

In the middle of this emergency, all I could do was to chide my daughter for breaking house rules that morning.  We didn't allow TV before school.

“Yes,” she answered.  I nodded, but I looked back at Vince.  The news seemed surprising to him, but he looked at the clock and then back at me.  We were going to be late for school.

“I have to go,” I said to Mario.  I was in shock but I knew I had to function for the kids.  I also thought about the kids in my classroom – and their families.  I had to pick up Justin.  I had to get Vince and Alicia to school.  I  saw the future as the next half-hour of my life.  Get Justin- get to school.

“I’ll be home as soon as I can,” Mario said before he hung up.  Translation: we will all soon be home- all of us together.  Safe or not safe – together.

Justin knew what was going on and started to talk about it in the van.  It gave us all license to speculate what had happened.  All of us seemed to know it was a terrorist attack and that it was most likely coming from Muslim extremists.  

This was not over.  

I knew school would be a good  place for them all to process this thing together.  Teens need peers to process.

By comparison, I was going to a classroom of kids whose main support were their parents.  I would be the “delivery system of normal and safe” that I was trained to be as a teacher.  Would any of them be there?

We had drills for fire, earthquakes and floods.  We even had emergency drills for school shootings now.  What we didn’t have was emergency drills for terrorist attacks coming from the sky – no one in the USA did then….

I drove to school, my heart in my throat and a feeling of wariness.  I had to get to school.  What would I do?  What would I say to the kids?  I drove, carefully.  I tried to react to everything carefully.  I arrived at school, the parking lot bustling with familiar scenes: kids dashing to the halls to chat with each other, parents dropping off...

I knew better than to demand my kids kiss me before they exited the vehicle.  I would check on them later....

I walked toward my classroom that morning, smiling at the kids on the playground. On the way to my classroom the principal, Pastor Greenfield, stopped me to see if I had heard the news.  

"I have!" I whispered, carefully.  "You want to give me some direction on how I should conduct myself this morning?  What should I say?"  I felt very scared and cautious.

"Why not follow their lead?" he said, rather comfortably.  "See if the kids bring it up.  If they do, explain that they are safe here and that it will be a normal school day.  Encourage prayer.  God is in control, as always."

He turned to another teacher who asked him the same thing; I walked slowly toward the classroom to begin the strangest, normal day of my life.  I was the one who was supposed to be calm and provide peace?  Tall order for me...

That morning I realized how vulnerable our country was to random acts of terrorism. 

That kind of feeling doesn't go away easily.  

Grandma

My first memories of my grandma were with my grandpa.  They were always referred to as “Grandma and Grandpa” in our house, where I capitalized their titles like they were names, like Jesus.  They were, looking back, the backbone of my family.  My grandpa was a chess-playing, bar-b-queuing generous man who loved me.  My grandma was the center of the house, wherever she was.

Her name was Juana.  She was born on the October 31, the eve of All Saints on the Catholic liturgical calendar. In Mexico (where she was born) it also was Día de los Muertos, or The Day of the Dead, a celebration that represents the unity between life and death, where merging of the Catholic feast with Indian rituals was commonplace.  This was a picture of my grandma’s faith: Catholic to the core with a little spiritual concoction thrown in.

“Mija,” she once said to me when I was old enough to digest a strong spiritual truth.  “Last night I dreamed that we were in a funeral, crying, crying.” She looked a little excited, delivering this news to me.  “This means there will be a wedding in our family!”  Sure enough, my cousin Debbie was engaged the next week and grandma pretended to be surprised.

She was also a big believer in church, confession, the Rosary and honouring the spiritual superiority of Catholicism.  When I told her in 1987 that I was leaving the Catholic Church to begin attending the Methodist church with Mario, she shook her head and pursed her lips.  “Oh, Janet...” she half-whispered. “What have you done?”  In her eyes, it was almost the same as a tattoo or a piercing, an action unbecoming of a granddaughter of hers. 

With all of this said, I must tell you that my grandma was the most amazing person I ever knew.  She was the most loving, most personable, most teachable soul I have ever met.  She was my hero from a young age, for who she was, her ability to make others happy, and her capacity to be there whenever you needed her. 

She stood not quite five feet tall, with black hair that hung down to the middle of her back.  I didn;t know this until she spent the night at our house once, and she unrolled her braid from the crown that usually crested her head and brushed it out before she went to bed.  I almost gasped in the dark, but I was supposed to be asleep.  From my bottom bunk I heard her praying for a long time, then finally fall asleep.  “Patty,” I whispered to my sister above me, “grandma has long hair!”  Patty was asleep, but apparently my “secret” made me a laughing stock at the breakfast the next day. 

“What did you think it was, moron!” Patty giggled over our mush and hot chocolate.  Grandma was laughing, too.  She thought the whole thing was precious.

Since she never learned to drive, she seemed to cook constantly, always being ready for surprise guests (who always were showing up, actually surprised that a meal was awaiting them).  When we (her immediate family) came over, she would reach into her kitchen drawer, take out a ball of dough and roll a tortilla and have it in our hands before we could sit down.  She made molasses cookies sprinkled with sugar that always had thesame size and shape (I still remember how they tasted) and beans that were so famous in our town that our driver’s ed. teacher actually drove us by her house just in case she’d be cooking them. 

In a world of changing everything, she was a constant.  A beam of joy and light and joy and everything I ever wanted to be. 

Today would have been her birthday.

On  February 21, 1992 she died, after a short illness.  My kids knew her as their great-grandmother who cooked burritos for them.  I knew her as my whole world’s ozone, the one who held everything inside, the one who was the touchstone of everything.  I was perplexed at how few tears I shed at her funeral, confused by the thing that others call grief.  I was still in shock.

It wasn’t until 1993, at the Police Olympics in San Diego when I got in touch with my grief.  It was the weirdest thing in my life.

Mario, competing in the decathlon, was out after ripping a hamstring muscle the first day of competition.  While disappointed, he made arrangements for us to at least enjoy the trip while we were there.  We decided to take the red trolley into Mexico the next day, where we would shop and eat.  On the crowded train, a woman of my grandma’s stature sat directly opposite me.  I looked up at her, and realized she was a small Mexican lady, with a black braid wrapped around her head like a crown.  She had my grandma’s eyes, her shoes, even the style of dress my grandma wore. 

I looked up at her, and she smiled at me. 

I smiled back, then for some weird, unexplainable reason, I began to cry.  She was so like my grandma, who I now remembered was absent from my life.  A woman who I missed beyond measure, who left a gaping hole in my heart that was just revealed to me.  I realized that in the past year I had become very busy, taking care not to reconnect too much with her memories or her things.  The tears became sobs and Mario looked at me, startled. 

“What’s the matter, babe?” he asked, pretty loud.  People were staring already.  The woman across from me opened her purse and took out a McDonald’s napkin that was folded in her purse, handing it to me.  I tried to say thank you, but I couldn’t speak.  She knew she had triggered something, I think, because her eyes were knowing and made deep contact with mine. 

Mario’s concern turned to a whisper.  “Janet, what is wrong?  People are starting to give me dirty looks.” It was then that he saw her.  “Is it this lady? Is it grandma?”  I nodded.  He put his arm around me and escorted me off the train at the next stop, I assume for air. 

When we got off the train, it all dried up again.  I was left, speechless, tearless and without any good explanation for what happened on the train.  Mario didn’t need any explanation, he just held me for a bit and then we got back on the trolley. 

When I got home I called my mom.  I told her the story about the mystery lady on the trolley, and she totally related.  I made a point to actively grieve my grandmother, every time I remembered her.

Last year I planted a big, pink rose in my garden called Rina Hugo that reminded me of her.  It has gorgeous, old rose delight, with big pink buds that in the Southern Hemisphere, are open on her birthday.  Just like grandma – bright, fragrant, delightful. 

On Dia de los Muertos, the person who died and is honored is believed by some to have a spirit that is expected to return to their home.  I know my grandma is home.