I’ve always fancied myself a bit of a psychic. My mother told me I would remind her of doctor’s appointments about which I could not have known before I could read.
The day I realized I am not at all psychic was a few years ago. It was the fourth day of school, a ridiculously beautiful fall morning. A piercing blue sky and just a slight bit of chilliness. It was my second year of teaching. I’d just finished an inspiring week of professional development. I remember writing the date and pausing to look at it as though it might hold some significance. I remember reading Kenny and the Little Kickers to my class and facilitating a deep-ish book talk from my new students. I remember feeling like a good teacher. I glanced at the clock a few minutes after 9 am. Long enough to remember doing it now, six years later.
When they called the first kid to go home, I thought nothing of it. When they called the third kid to go home I laughed and made a joke. When an announcement came over the loud speaker saying, “Mrs. Sanchez, your husband is in Staten Island and he is ok.” I thought… that’s odd. When they called the seventh kid to go home, I started to worry.
It wasn’t until 11:20, when I brought what was left of my class down for lunch, past throngs of crazed parents and crying teachers, into the stench that was filling the school, that I asked, “What’s going on?” Ann, my colleague, said it, “They did it. The twin towers. They’re gone. They bombed them.”
This was also to be the day I became an adult. I had to hold my act together for these six and seven year-olds. I couldn’t turn on the outside into the blubbering crushed child I was on the inside.
So many of the kids were being picked up from school, that the principal had everyone go to the large all-purpose gym-like room. It looked like this: a huddle of teachers in the back grouped around a radio trying not to cry, or crying, or staring at nothing. Kindergarten, first and second grade children standing in lines in front of our heroic science teacher, an unsung hero of that day. He was playing songs from a little boom box, and doing dances that the kids were dancing along with. Take me out to the baaalll gaaaaame. Take me out to the crooooowd. Buy me some peanuts…
I was looking out over the crowd and wondering, are any of these kids not going to be picked up by anyone today? The art teacher ran out of the room saying, “My brother. My brother works on the 92nd floor.”
When I was finally able to leave, I took the bus. On the bus was where I heard the first of what was to become years of hateful, ignorant comments people feel justified to make because of that day. They should just not let those people into the country in the first place. What’s wrong with immigration? When the bus went over the expressway, in the spot where I usually saw the two gleaming towers, was an upside-down L of smoke. The wind was blowing the smoke right across the river to my Brooklyn.
I don’t need to say anything more. Except this: in the past few weeks I have been touched by two tragic losses. They have made me ponder the nature of tragedy. In doing so, I cannot avoid going back to that day. That day five students in my school lost parents. The art teacher lost her brother. My favorite colleague’s husband, a lawyer working out of the World Trade Center, was in Albany that day in court. Ann’s husband had just finished a week’s work of carpentry at the Twin Towers and had been at JFK that morning. Tragedy is random and senseless. I know that when it happens, you never become that person you were before. For me, besides the obvious losses: the lives, the feeling of safety, the privacy and freedom and elections taken in the name of that day… besides all of those, I mourn the fact that for the rest of my life, the first week of school will hold the memory of that day. For the rest of my life, I cannot step out on a ridiculously beautiful fall day and not remember
I guess I hadn't thought much about it, but I'd never prepared artichokes. It's not that I haven't eaten them - yes, mostly the marinated kind that come in the jar or the delicious roasted ones from Caputo's on Court Street. They don't look that difficult or mysterious or ornery. 
