2001-09-12 - 01:12
i could not foresee this thing happening to you

Six o'clock this morning or thereabouts, I woke up for no apparent reason and had a lot of trouble getting back to sleep. Finally drifted off, got up with my alarm at 8:45. Tried to do morning meditation, only did it for about five minutes. Went to the bathroom where the janitor, an amiable older guy, asked me if I'd just gotten up, and then said that two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center and there had been an attack on the Pentagon. I half-thought he was pulling my leg, as old guys like my grampa sometimes do. So I got on my computer and tried to access BBC and CNN, which took a while, of course, because that's what everyone else in the world was doing.

The next thing I did was check alt.cult-movies.rocky-horror to see if there was any news on the only group of friends I had in that part of the country. Reports were already coming in, letting us know as people on the NYC cast were accounted for one or two at a time. None of my family is on the east coast, but a lot of my granfaloon is.

The reason I got up at 8:45 was that I had an appointment to get blood drawn at 9:30, so I put my computer to sleep and walked from my dorm to the health center, and the campus has never been this quiet, ever, and god help us it never will be again. When you got close enough to common areas there were radios and TVs everywhere, and people sitting in shell-shock and hugging each other. At the health center, there was a radio on NPR in the waiting room. It was about 10:10 by the time I was actually sitting in the nurse's office having a very nice and apologetic nurse try with some difficulty to find one of my incredible disappearing veins. She found one eventually, and congratulated me for being a trooper about it, and I said, "No, I just needed someone who was more worried about it than I was... bet they didn't teach you that in nursing school." As I passed the people congregating on the lawn on my way back, I thought, "By the end of the day, people here will have mobilized and found ways for us to help."

Then I watched the TV in our dorm for a while and went to Commons. I was kind of planning to go to Latin class, but as I was getting breakfast I met my friend Katie, who had just been watching the footage of the second plane crash, and I hugged her and she cried for a minute. She told me her cousin worked in New York, and she hadn't reached him. We went back to one of the other dorm social rooms, where a few of our friends were watching CBS. I stayed there until about noon. I spent a while talking to Jay, who is a sensitive political scientist, probably the worst combination of things to be when looking at a situation like this.

I talked to Joey for a while online. At times like this, I prefer sharing my opinion (e.g., this is weird; I can't stop having these paranoid X-Files thoughts; why do you suppose nobody's taken credit for it yet; etc.) to sharing my feelings (e.g., I'm scared; I'm angry; I feel helpless), so we did that for a while. Joey's one of a very few people with whom I felt comfortable floating more out-there possibilities.

I actually went to Hum 210 conference, but it was weird and disjointed, and we got out half an hour early. At 4:15 there was a general assembly in the auditorium. The President of the college, Peter Steinberger, spoke for a few minutes, not really knowing what to say, but setting out his feelings and experience as best he could. He said that one of our physics professors had told him that the way the towers collapsed was baffling from a physicist's standpoint, and since he, Peter Steinberger, could understand next to nothing about this morning, he found it somehow comforting that someone who knew everything about physics couldn't figure it out from that standpoint either.

Then the Dean of Student Services, Regina Mooney, talked about her morning, and how she had decided to let her six-year-old son watch the TV coverage with her before going to school. He asked a few questions about what was going on, and then turned to her with one last one.

"Mom," he said, "...so what do I do today?"

Then the students spoke. They formed a line, or a linelike blob, at each of the two open mikes in the middle of the room, and said whatever they had come to say. Some of them shared their feelings, some of them shared their opinions, some of them shared bad poetry. You get what you get, with an open mike. Some people brought their own political spin to it, and most emphasized the importance of seeing that this does not divide us--that there is no us and them, there's just us. Some shared the feelings that they were most troubled to find in themselves--apathy, guilt, signs of creeping racism. Many expressed deeply idealistic pacifistic views that I suspect Jay was referring to after the assembly when he spoke of some students' political naivete. As I'd predicted, there were several action plans mentioned, a main one being giving blood, which not all of us can do, but there are plenty of other options as well.

Many people I knew spoke. Peter, also a deeply sensitive person, showed barely controlled anger at those who took political stances at the open mike. Jay spoke up about the danger of turning this into a political platform as well. Katie took the mike in almost an explosion--or an implosion--of emotion, breaking down in tears at the feeling of helplessness that we all shared, reminding us that war wouldn't bring anybody back, but neither would peace. She implored everyone who was in this pain to remember that the pain will pass, but what we do now will stay. For the first time since hearing the news, I found myself crying. Katie took off as soon as she was done, but I caught up with her to give her a hug. "That's what I forgot to say. People should give each other hugs," she said. She still had no news on her cousin. I hugged her again, left her in the company of another friend and went back inside.

When the assembly was over, as people were starting to trickle out, I took one of the mikes and quickly gave Katie's addendum, which gained "amen"s from many.

Dinner with Peter and Jason. I don't remember what anybody said, except that Jason listened to some of my more paranoid observations. We all got fed up with seeing Osama Bin Laden on TV, so we walked to Peter's apartment. It was around sunset. The sky was striking, full of angular clouds all streaking in one direction, looking (to me) for all the world like a fleet of angels sweeping towards something, or away from it.

At Peter's apartment, we talked about the news, but we also had a sort of normal conversation about other things. I wandered back to Commons by way of Katie's dorm, where she was not, and found Jay, Joel, Jess, and a mystery girl who turned out to be a freshman named Dhyana. Tristan, who has family on the east coast, showed up too, and he and the others talked in worrying circles about him checking in on his folks until I had to be the one to make it clear to the others that Tristan had, in fact, spoken to his family and knew they were all right.

We abandoned the TV for Jay's room. This time it actually didn't take that long to end up in normal-type conversation. Dhyana turned out to be pretty cool. Tristan fiddled around on the computer. People did tend to be cuddlier with one another, but we managed, for a couple hours, to talk about books and sex and squirrels and how to keep Joel from falling out the window. We actually had to shush each other quite a few times, since we were a little rambunctious. Katie eventually showed up, along with Maritza, who had carried her much of the way for she had no shoes. Katie was feeling much better. Her cousin and all related east coast persons were accounted for. More hugging ensued.

None of us was too eager to leave, and in the end Jess had to basically kick us out so she and Jay could get some sleep. More hugging. I guess this sort of thing is what they call affirming life in the midst of tragedy, or words to that effect. Really, it's just reassuring yourself that even if it has changed forever, the world you know does, in fact, still exist.

One of the stupid things stuck in my head is a "Veterinarian's Hospital" sketch from one of the Muppet records, where Rowlf is in the middle of an operation singing some old song that I never identified, and one of the nurses says, "Dr. Bob, how can you sing at a time like this?" And he says, "I'm not singing 'At A Time Like This,' I'm singing '[name of the song].'"

Listen, I have to go to bed now. Love to all of you; I hope you and yours are well. Valete.

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