Daze of September

The Kindergarten teacher returned to her class after 20 minutes (possibly her only break of the day). Her comment to me, something like, the world is changed; you might be especially needed in your office now. I can’t remember whether she told me why or I learned later. With the puppets who helped teach the Guidance lesson, I left innocence and entered incomprehension.
Later, after going to be with The Buckeyes and coming back, we had our– if I may be a queen wannabe briefly–“annus horribilis.” I thought of the survivors of 9/11 many times. How did they stand up on shaky ground after the rug was pulled out from under them. We had many people pass from Fernside that year (a slow tsunami that keeps coming); not as many quite as quickly, though.
Retrying reading, I selected a book about and a book by E.B. White. Dr. Richerson would be proud. I hope. He suggested the Strunk & White after discovering our connection with language & literature one day as we worked together in the PE Department office. I wonder would I have picked Here is New York if I had known of the foreshadowing I found.
E.B. White’s New York had already changed from 1948 to 1949. “The Lafayette hotel, mentioned in passing, has passed, despite the mention.” No way he could have foreseen the changes 9/11 brought, yet he wrote, “The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.” He was talking about a different kind of war; whatever kind, the consequences seem the same to me.
Mr. White wrote of a different time, a new United Nations: “The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.”
He concluded the “slim” “love letter” with symbolism important to me since Mrs. Collins gifted us with memorizing the poem in 5th grade…a tree:
“A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolized the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: ‘This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.’ If it were to go, all would go—this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.”
Maybe that explains why I hang on to the Peace Lilies, though they look war-torn, and hope they live to see better/me-out-of-the daze days.