9-11 – Fourteen years ago today

I wrote a short post on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. In reading it just now I did something I seldom do. I made a couple of corrections. I changed “undo” to “undue” the correct spelling. I also changed one “the to a “that.” It would take me a full year of ten-day slogs to edit the whole blog going back nine years.

I was trying to see if I could find any mention of what I was doing on the day itself not the tenth anniversary. I’m at the airport now and asked our driver why the flags were at half mast. Of course, I was embarrassed to have been so clueless. I’m surprised I didn’t see the day noted in the PB Post.

I was preoccupied on 9/11 too. I heard a report in passing on an airplane crashing into the Twin Towers but didn’t catch that it was ominous. I imagined it was a piper cub or at worst like the crash that left a plane sticking out of the Empire State Building back in the 1950’s in other words “tragic” not “TRAGIC!!!!!!”

I was hurrying out of the house to drop something off at the Superintendent’s office. When I got there everyone was listening to the news and in a state of alarm. I recall beginning to blow it off only be told it seemed very serious. I headed for home listening to NPR on my short drive to 21st Avenue. Upon my return I immediately turned on the television in our kitchen and saw the pictures of the smoking World Trade Towers. I saw one tower crumble and then the next. I imagined thousands, tens of thousands, dying before my eyes.

A few days later I made an appointment to speak to the one board member I had near poisonous relations with and told her that I was too devastated to work on passing a levy referendum for more money to fund our schools. She begged me to find the strength and in time I did. 2001 was an election year. I was so determined I went to one Board meeting and, when I heard opposition to our even offering the referendum, I gave an impassioned speech explaining how necessary I felt a levy was and then ended with a fist pounding down on the dais and a “God Dammit.” This was the “obscenity-lace diatribe” that columnist Ralph Doty said I was guilty of in his column damning me three days before the 2007 election which I lost to Judy Seliga-Punyko. You can watch the speech here. I’ve always been proud of it. Or watch it here on my blog.

Judy has chided me for cutting the seven period day at this time. I had little choice. The referendum failed. Ironically, Judy voted against it telling me that she couldn’t vote for it since our School Board had not had the courage to close Central High School.

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