Sometimes I wonder if the words “I’m sorry” are what people want you to say. By people, I mean the ardent critics complaining that tax-payers should stop wasting money or–my favorite expression–throwing money at problems in the classroom, and instead ask educators to live within the means of a shrunken state budget. The ones who suggest that you’re not working hard enough, that you need to prove your worth as teachers before you earn more money. Meanwhile, it’s just you, the thirty-four kids assigned to your classroom every block, and an email from your principal reminding you that at the rate it’s going, your school will be devoid of copy paper within five weeks.
I’m writing you today to ask you to never apologize.
The smoke was back. There it was, off in the distance, this time over a field. It had moved. And, in another second, gone.
This week I had the lonely task of driving I-40 east from Memphis to Little Rock, a long, straight, and empty highway that stretches away from the Mississippi River. There, the land is flat. The road is simple. The sight lines afford views north and south until the tree lines interrupt them.
It’s empty here, mostly farmland, and the only elevations noticeable are the berms built up to allow for an overpass. Water collects in simple reservoirs for irrigation.
Ahead of my rental Chevrolet, pointed straight until it found the hills of Little Rock, I saw on the horizon what I thought at first must be a cloud–or perhaps, more accurately, a puff–of dark smoke. It didn’t act like smoke, though, given how it blew sideways across the interstate. The speed wasn’t right. Something was off.
Then, just as I blinked, the entire cloud disappeared. I thought I was in trouble, imagining things or worse, hallucinating, while driving out in the middle of nowhere. Immediately I tried to think back to what time I woke up that morning in Memphis, how much sleep I’d had, whether it was possible I was dreaming–
The smoke was back. There it was, off in the distance, this time over a field. It had moved. And, in another second, gone.
Sometimes, life asks us to hand parts of ourselves back. September 11 was one of those times.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following post originally appeared as a Facebook note published on September 11, 2011, ten years after the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.
Whenever I write about September 11th, I feel somewhat guilty for the grief I feel. I didn’t directly know anyone who was lost on that day, but I know plenty of folks who fit into that category. I am two degrees removed from a lot of tragedy. My grandfather, though, worked at the World Trade Center before he retired and moved to Florida. Most of my Dad’s family lives in Monmouth County, NJ, which lost 147 people in the attacks. I feel connected.
These days we all feel connected. Television this last week has all but made it impossible to escape the replays of the towers burning, the planes striking, the collapse and smoke and misery. Newspapers are running the headlines all week. Websites feature tributes, the radio runs urgent dispatches from a decade ago, their audio scratchy enough to underscore how old they’ve already become. Indeed, it was a time when television was still square, newspapers were still read, and cell phones were still dumb and dropped calls.
Inevitably, we all remember where we were. I started the morning at Smoky Mountain High School, where I was observing a class when a student came in to say there’d been a terrorist attack. I left, returned to my dorm room at Reynolds Hall at Western Carolina University, and watched the towers fall.
Peter Jennings told, or tried to tell as best he could, the story of the day. Amazingly, I was able to connect a single phone call to my relatives in Lincroft, NJ. They were safe. Nobody knew then how long this moment was going to last.
