September 11 is a kindergartener

Where were you on September 11? I was 38 weeks pregnant with my youngest, and home in our apartment with my oldest, being between jobs (and far too preggers for any prospective employer to want to hear it from me). My husband called me from work and said to turn on the news and try to make sense of this footage. This plane seemed to have hit the World Trade Center. At that moment, beholding that scene, not once did it cross my mind a) that the attack was deliberate or b) that the towers would not hold up. The plane looked so small and the towers loomed so large.

What I remember of that day was the slow unfolding of the horror. It’s one plane, probably an unfortunate accident. It’s two planes, but the towers can easily withstand the hit. The one tower fell but the other tower will hold up. Where is the President? Another plane hit the Pentagon. Where is the President? There’s still another plane that missed its mark. How many are there and why can’t we stop them?

My sister would come over, weeping. I had a different reaction. I became robotic and practical. We would become news and command central for the family. We would learn that my father, who often travels for work, was in the financial district for a meeting; that my brother-in-law, an electrician, had just finished some restoration in the wing of the Pentagon that was hit. Both were fine, but my father and his colleagues were so desperate to get out of the city that they chartered a limousine to Baltimore.

My daughter would turn off the tv, saying, “I don’t like this show. It’s too violent.” Yes. Yes it is.

There was concern about a hospital bed and blood shortage. We lived near enough to DC that I was briefly concerned for my own imminent hospitalization. But of course the hospitals were fine when my son was born a few weeks later.

That son will turn six in a few weeks and that is the way I tell time. The September 11 attacks and everything that came after -- the fall of the Taliban, ink-stained fingers, “special registration”, the Department of Homeland Security, Guantanamo, “shoe bomber,” “enemy combatants,” “shock and awe,” “hidey hole,” Saddam on trial and executed -- have all taken place in the time it took for my child to learn to talk, walk, go potty, tie his shoes, and count to a hundred. September 11 is a kindergartener.

Howlin' With the OWLS, Part 1

I'm so psyched.

I have just been rolled into a snowballing e-mail started by a group of righteous women I went to law school with, looking to have a reunion. We called ourselves the Owls, for Organization for Women Law Students and Staff. We were a student group, but so much more than that. We were a clubhouse, a haven, a lifeline for each other during the nasty business of navigating law school, and all of our other life choices during that pivotal time. During those three years, four of us got engaged; one came out of the closet; one left an abusive spouse; one faced an unintended pregnancy; we all flopped down on the OWLSS lounge couch after particularly brutal rounds of Socratic hazing; some of us graduated at the top of the class; some quit.

We came from all walks of life, but what is class in law school? As a student you are ramen-noodle poor and yet as a future lawyer, no one is crying for you. I learned a good lesson about so-called sophistication my first week. It was the “Summer of Mercy” and anti-abortion activists had pledged to make Iowa City the next Wichita. I went over to see my new acquaintances -- "alleged feminists" -- graduates of the local hayseed college, thinking I would blow their minds. Let’s go over and help the counter-protest at the women’s clinic, I challenged. Wait right here, they replied. And came out with signs and t-shirts and my buddy C’s got cuffs and a gag to symbolize the “gag rule.” Turns out these hayseeds could teach this DC kid a thing or two about demonstrations.

But when ya start carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao

Does it bother anyone else that CNN insists on referring to the PRC as "Communist China?" As in "More disturbing recall news from Communist China." It's not that it's inaccurate, EXACXTLY. But, hey, as long as you're channeling Archie Bunker, why not go all the way and call it Red China? Why not just say "The pinkos are trying to poison our children again!" ?