At the still point of the turning world

On the west coast, the realization that came with the terrorist attacks on September 11th, that our lives were changed, that our world was at risk, that “the American way of life was being threatened” came in a very different tone than it did for other coasts, for other places. I was a sophomore in college, avoiding an early morning aerobics class, laying in bed groggily, when a thin, large eyed friend who lived in the room across the hall burst in our room and said her mom just called from Massachusetts, planes were crashing all over the country and hundreds of people were dying. It was a dream. I’m sure that has been said before, in those exact terms, a dream. But as I pulled on a pair of maroon sweat pants with felt numbers on the left hip, as if I was athletic and shouldered a grey hooded sweatshirt over my head, aware that the colors complemented and that I looked attractively rumpled, aware at that point that it mattered what I looked like when flip flopping into the dorm lounge to watch the TV bolted to the upper corner of the wall, I was dreaming. I was not awake yet. I shuffled into the lounge and watched the news cast, the pictures at 7am in the morning as others had already been at work for hours and then been scorched to death or thrown themselves out of burning windows 57 stories off the ground. It was a dream. I was groggy still and then I woke up gradually to the choked up accounts of journalists, the ashen faces of onlookers, the shrieking drone of sirens. I remember being amazed that everything continued to work, that the shower still turned on and the cafeteria ladies still came to work and the microwave hummed with my hot chocolate water. I was amazed that everything didn’t just take a few days off to be very sad. We spent the day in the dorm room lounge on the pristine Montecito campus of a small private college where the lack of parking passes was the biggest problem we faced, in a town full of movie stars in flip flops in a state where Arnold just won in a country full of those that remembered another time of crisis and a generation that had never had crisis before. I peered at this trauma through a small television screen, shoulder to shoulder with the educationally and financially elite, the millennial generation who had not seen civil rights or Vietnam, or the atom bomb but through an even more distant film strip in history classes or in the distant voices of our grandparents. This was very new to us.

A year later, I was studying abroad in England with lovely intelligent people from that same pristine college and our two professors and their spouses led us through the cities of the UK and settled us in to a month long stint of intensive study at an enormous old manor house run by nuns called Hengrave Hall. The nearest town was called Bury St. Edmonds and to reach it, one must amble down a picturesque lane through the grand entrance gate of Hengrave, along a street lined with thatched houses and cottage gardens to a very regular and modern looking bus shelter where you caught a very regular and modern looking bus and wound through the roads that were made before maps, before cars and before modern looking anything to the city center bus stop. It was on a day that I had come into town to escape the literary intensity of my comrades to walk through the local market, that I stopped for a coffee and a sandwich in a very british looking café. I sat at a small table near the window, aware as I always was when away from my group, of my American voice ordering the meal and my very American hair and shoes. I had brought a book of poetry, partly to feel productive while escaping and partly because I knew that I would stop and eat alone and eating alone with a book in hand is far less pathetic. As the waiter brought my plate and I pushed my cup of coffee further towards the center of the table to make room, I was aware of sympathetic looks. I thought back to the bus ride and the walk through the market and realized that I had received many of these looks throughout the day, from the chemist at the drug store when I asked where to find a certain kind of chapstick, from the vendor at the market who had sold me a scarf I planned to give my sister for Christmas. They heard my voice and cringed a little and smiled. I sat eating my sandwich carefully, thinking how strange those looks had been. And then the manager of the little café came out from the kitchen and said in a slightly raised voice as he looked around the room, “In respect for the lives lost and the terrible tragedy that took place in America exactly one year ago, I would ask your silence for a minute now to remember.” The café hushed and many people looked towards my table near the window. A woman near the swinging door to the kitchen bowed her head and some businessmen looked towards the large clock above the bar, their faces furrowed and concerned. The sympathy in the room was palpable. I felt a thick knot rise in my throat and nearly sobbed for the sadness of it all. I knew that I was being watched and so did not sob, or even cry a little; I knew, especially as a lover of literature that that would have been too much, too dramatic. But I loved England so much in that moment. The thoroughness of the emotion was full in me in Bury St. Edmonds, a small British town outside of London.