A day in my life - 9/11/2001

 

America is under attack, and I want to hide under my desk in my cubicle. But instead I stand with the other reporters in front of the TV. None of us speak. Two commercial passenger jets hijacked from Logan Airport in Boston struck the World Trade Center. How? Why?  I see Manhattan burning, the Twin Towers reduced to rubble, thousands of people running through smoke-filled streets. A third jet hits the Pentagon, and a fourth plane heading for Washington crashes in a Pennsylvania field. What the hell? President Bush is aboard Air Force One heading to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, home of the Strategic Command, which controls the United States’ nuclear weapons. Armageddon? I file into the conference room with my colleagues. I can hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears. “What the f--- is going on?” yells Harold, my editor, as he tries to wrap his head around what is happening. I begin to shake. We are all veteran reporters in the room, but there is dead silence. Yet it is our job to inform the public, and our reflexes kick in. Harold barks out my assignment: “Connect the dots. Tie this rampage with the first attack on American soil at Pearl Harbor.” I go back to my cubicle and call my husband and speak to my children. Then I block out everything but this story. What happened 60 years ago? I find a former Army Air Corps mechanic, a Purple Heart recipient who was stationed at Hickam Field near Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed the airfield. He had been on duty all night and was going to bed at the time of the early morning raid. He tells me that he ran to get a rifle in the hangar, and it was hit three times. He says that 200 men died there, and the planes, barracks and hangar were heavily damaged. He says that 2,000 servicemen lost their lives in the harbor. Yet he points out that Pearl Harbor was a military target and an act of war, but the World Trade Center victims are civilians. I speak to a widow, whose husband was an aviation machinist mate first class aboard the Helena. She says that he was just getting out of bed, putting on his shoes and planning to go to church when a bomb hit amidships. She tells me that he ran up to the deck, and bullets from a Japanese plane flew over his head and killed two men. She says that what her husband most remembered about that day was the confusion and disbelief at the surprise attack. I write the story on deadline. I climb the three flights of stairs in the parking garage on wobbly knees. Today is the day that changes everything. God help us!

Escape

Stuck between a rock and a hard place?  

Turn your back on these troubling times and escape.

"It is solved by walking," wrote 5th-century saint, Augustine of Hippo.

Come with me.

Let's walk along the seashore together.

Breathe in the salt air. Embrace the stillness. 

Plod on... even though we may stumble.

When the wind shifts the sea grasses, choose a new path.  

Amid the seaweed, await the crashing waves.

Look around and see how everything fits together seamlessly.

Observe the Creator's art. There is nothing better than this.

The Hiding Place

 

Sitting in my favorite chair of vintage hard-rock maple that my parents bought as newlyweds, I am in the space where I feel most safe.

During the past year I have fled to the summer house countless times to reside in this little corner of the room by the window, secure in its confines.

Whether weathering storms of winter snows and spring rains or bathed in bright sunshine, I hid and read.

As the pandemic raged, my world became smaller; but my worldview became bigger.

The library shelves behind me hold dozens of my books, and I have read them all – ranging from an illustrated hardcover of J. K. Rowling’s children’s book “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” a special Christmas gift from my best friend, to a giant glossy picture book of Francesca Premoli-Droulers’ “Writers’ Houses”, a $50 splurge at Barnes & Noble that I bought decades ago with the generous Christmas bonus from a kind publisher.

I vacillated in the store whether to put the money toward the household budget or purchase this one-of-a-kind tome that was way beyond my means.

Today I think I made the right decision.

Sequestered, yet set free, I lived this past year in the pages of my books.

In my mind’s eye, I sat at a school desk in Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry holding a magic wand, or at Karen Blixen’s writing desk in Kenya gazing “Out of Africa.”

I delved into gardening books, planning rows of summer vegetable plants that would sustain my family despite supermarket shortages.

I travelled to the “The Country of the Pointed Firs” with Sarah Orne Jewett, and I became a writer who spends three months in a small coastal town in nineteenth-century Maine, or moved into the cabin that Henry David Thoreau built on the shore of “Walden” Pond.

But most of all, I pondered “The Divine Hours” by Phyllis Tickle, praying for an end to the plight of a people on a planet in pain.

Frozen in time

We wait... 

In the dead of winter, we are frozen in place.

Temperatures dip, and Arctic winds blow.

Snow falls sporadically, clinging to every tree branch and blade of grass.

We hibernate and pray for an early spring.

The woods beckon, a magical forest draped in winter white.

Behind a stone wall, dormant farmland stretches to the sea.

Freed from the barn, horses clad in blankets brave the cold.

The snowy path to the barn is all uphill.

Under the snow by the stone wall, daffodils bide their time.