I recognize the maturity of Kathy’s response. After all, she is married and an adult.
According to my students, some classes are going to the Lecture Center, which is broadcasting the event. Do my students wish to join them? We discuss. Our syllabus shows that next week we move on to the topic of unit planning, which assumes an ability to create daily lesson plans. Their unit plan is due in three week’s time. The students want to continue with our lesson on lesson planning. I agree with them—what is the use? What has happened has happened. The rest is just spectacle. I would rather read about this event in tomorrow’s New York Times than allow for us to be pulled, like moths to flame, into the Lecture Hall with its 12-foot screen. No one is visibly upset. I’m not upset either, at least not publicly. But the instant I direct my students toward the lesson, my sister Kate’s face and her funny “duck-foot” walk flash through my mind. It’s still hard for me to imagine that this baby of our family is now a corporate attorney working in a skyscraper just across from the Twin Towers.
Could she be dead?
Horror uncoils like a cobra from deep inside my solar plexus
I will call her from my office as soon as class ends.
My practical mind assumes control, but I can’t block the sound of a menacing hiss.
“Do any of you have family or friends who work in the Twin Towers area?”
No one does.
I do not mention my sister to my students.
I think about the last time I saw Kate. It was only a few weeks ago. I took a rare day off and met her in her office, high up in a tower overlooking New York’s harbor. It was the first time I had been there—and I was eager to experience for myself the swanky cafeteria that she endlessly raved about. After a lunch of smoked salmon, cheesecake, and self-served cappuccinos, we went to her office by stepping in the elevator and gliding up two floors. The gleaming brass railings and library-like quiet were so different from my own office, with its torn linoleum flooring and the continual comings and goings of students and colleagues. If this were my workspace, I would have the luxury of sinking into my research projects undisturbed. Maybe those manuscripts I had started would be finished by now.
HVWP COMMONPLACE 15
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