Playing It Cool

I’m trying reeeeeaaaaaallly hard to play it cool. I walk about town, tucking my hair behind my ear, a fingertip feathering away the stray bead of sweat on my forehead, a bemused twitch on my lips . . . but my mind is agog. Agog, I say.

If you know me, you may be thinking I’m freaking out as I wait for a response from a publisher. Or perhaps you think this is about anxiety over my new role as a college instructor. Or maybe it's because I’m broke-ah-broke-ah-broke-er than a hobo until some paychecks start rollin’ in. But you’d be thinking wrong. Unless, you REALLY know me, and you know the truth:

The fall tv lineup is here! No more re-runs! Time once again to fill up my dvr with Revenge and Harry’s Law and Grey’s Anatomy and Supernatural and Falling Skies. That’s right, I love crap tv. LOVE. IT. If West Wing and Lost and X-Files and Wonder Woman were back in the mix, life would be perfect. Who needs money when you’ve got one-liners and predictable story arcs encapsulated in one-hour increments of sad sack crack? 

I’m sure you’re sitting there, judging me right now. That’s fine. I totally understand. I judge me, too. But I will stick up for myself in one sense: I can only write if there is something going on around me. I can’t bear silence. Music doesn’t do it for me, not when I’m trying to write. There is no better white noise than canned chatter (except Mad Man, I could never tune it out, I’d be unable to look away even though I ended each show in a black depression over my messed-up crush on that pig Draper).  Believe me, I’d rather be writing in a bar, surrounded by real life hook-ups and slurred singing, the ching of video poker and the howls of laughter from the drunks in the corner . . . but that is a hard role to play when you also want to keep your child. The State tends to frown on mommy’s who spend everyday at Joe’s Tavern. Or so I hear.

September 11

There are few moments seared into my mind’s eye like that of the morning of 9/11.  Those in the running: the Challenger exploding as I sat in my sophomore personal finance class; sitting in another class of youthful faces as the Berlin Wall came down in 1989; eating the perfect avocado in the middle of an isolated Mexican field, discovering peace in myself; the morning my father-in-law took his last breath and the following minutes in which my husband and his family had to re-define what it meant to live. But 9/11. My God, 9/11.

First off, let me say, I recognize how lucky I am to live on the West Coast for the past 40 years and to thus far be physically un-touched by war. I cannot begin to compare stories with the people of Afghanistan, Syria, the Ivory Coast, or, now, New York and Virginia and Pennsylvania. This powerful memory is from the point of view of a by-stander.

But I am an American, and a human. On the morning of 9/11, I stumbled out of bed, hair askew, one eye open, and turned on the news as I got into the shower. Prying myself out of the comforting stream of hot water, I toweled off, caught by an odd, cracking note in the newscaster’s voice. Turning the corner, the tv screen looked like a movie set. One of the twin towers was crumbling, smoke boiling like steam from a volcano, breaking up the Manhattan skyline. The local reporter half-screamed, “It was a plane! A plane hit the building!”

And, then, as I watched live television, a second airliner shot onto the screen and plowed into the second tower. “We’re at war,” I mumbled. “We’re at war!” I screamed, waking up my boyfriend. “We’re at war,” I chanted, a crazy woman as I scrambled for clothes, drove to the high school, and tried to get the classroom tv’s to work. We spent the day anxiously scanning the snowy channels and surfing the internet. I still have pages of documents we printed off from early reports coming into CNN and the BBC. I believed this was the first step in World War III, that someone was waging a full scale war on us, or that we were going to retaliate on a full-scale level.

Today’s reports from CNN and the BBC regarding the perpetrators are more detailed, hopefully accurate, but just as disturbing. Authorities seem confident in their assessments of guilt, but I always wonder why. Why did we, as a human race, get here. Not how. Why.

Today’s reports from CNN also discuss the personal consequences, the physical and psychological impact on our people, especially the grieving families. Why. And the first responders. Why. And the wounded or dead soldiers. Why.