Post by Robin Leigh Anderson on Sept 11, 2016 12:02:23 GMT -8
Six Hours
September 22, 2001
We were both driving over 200 miles from our California homes, Verna from hers in Visalia in the Central Valley and I from mine in Santa Barbara on the South Central Coast. I arrived first at the small motel off the dusty two-lane Highway 41. My left hand throbbed from swelling under the bright purple cast. I rummaged through my purse for the pain pills, knowing I could take only one for the time we would be there, and then I would need to be alert for the long drive home. It had been only 33 days since my surgery August 20th and eleven days since the world had changed. I had no sooner opened the door to our room than Verna’s van pulled up next to my car.
She set down her large picnic cooler inside the door and hugged me. Neither one of us wanted to let go. Tears filled my eyes at the reason why we had made this plan to meet halfway. Was I ready to face painful memories? Having come so far I had to be up for this. I started to sit down on the edge of the bed and my weak knees gave out.
Verna handed me a bottle of cold water and sat down on the other bed across from me. She started to unpack the cooler. I smiled slightly. She had also brought extra tissues. “You’re in a lot of pain,” she said, folding a pillow in half to stuff under my cast arm. “This isn’t easy for either of us.” Verna was primary caregiver to her two toddler great-grandchildren, and she could only be away from home for a short time and only on the weekend. Yet she chose to be with me, to support me in my desire to remember my friends. “Tell me about David. Isn’t he the one who, well, talks to you?”
I had to smile. “David’s voice has been in my ear since the day we met. I tend to be a little impulsive.” Verna rolled her eyes and my smile widened. “Yeah, well, impatient, too, that’s how we met. We were attending an accounting conference and I couldn’t comprehend a specific point. David had this orderly mind; he could cut to the bottom line so fast. He’d say in that slow methodical way of his, ‘now, Robin, you take blah blah blah and you blah blah and you get blah blah blah’. It always amazed me how he could visualize the steps of anything. Any time I’d get impatient, I’d hear David saying, ‘now, Robin…”. He was the steadiest human being I’ve ever known.” I took a swallow of water to calm my shaky voice. “I hear him now. He’s chiding me for driving all this way one-handed.”
Verna nodded. “I’d have to agree to that. I told you I thought it would be too much for you. I’d like you to tell me how a few simple words from this man could make the Robin I know calm down.”
I chuckled. “David was an exceptional young man. I’ll never forget the day I gave him a green striped shirt and flowered tie. I thought Mr. Starched White Shirt and Plain Black Tie was going to lose his eyeballs on the desk.” I shook my head. “Then I made him go to the men’s room and change into my selections. I gotta say, he looked great, and I’ve never seen anyone more uncomfortable with clothes on.”
Verna snickered. “You’ve seen him without clothes?”
I had to fight from choking on a swallow of water. The thought of seeing the very proper David in the altogether was comical beyond words. Verna leaned over and put a hand on my arm at my sudden change of expression. I would never see David again, in or out of clothes. I took a deep breath and then burst out laughing at the mental image of David naked but for that loud flowered tie. He would’ve blushed to his receding hairline. I shared this vision with Verna and we both giggled like naughty schoolgirls. I took great comfort from sharing my lost friend with another friend.
The alarm on Verna’s watch went off as I was regaling her with the tenth tale of how the staid David ever hooked up with a lunatic like me. I had been talking for an hour. Now I needed to put David aside, if only for the remainder of our day. I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“Darlena met David at the last seminar we all attended,” I said. “I purposely introduced them so David could be the voice of reason in her life and Darlena could help the stuffed shirt learn how to laugh. Oh, that girl could laugh. Her giggle could turn vinegar to honey. She would laugh at nothing and because of anything. I really loved that about her. It reminded me of when I was her age and my father told me I laughed in all the wrong places."
Verna frowned. “There is no wrong place to laugh.”
“Thank you! Exactly what I always told my father. When I met Darlena’s father, it became clear where she learned to be tickled at the world. She was a long-awaited only child. Her parents figured she might be the only one, so Darryl and Lena named her after them both. That’s how we met, at a seminar where she overheard me telling the story of how I got my name. By the end of our name stories we were fast friends, laughing and carrying on like sisters. One of our workshop leaders thought we were sisters. That made her laugh all the more and I started laughing and, oh, boy, we were a couple of nuts. One day she called me from the Bahamas…”
Half of Verna’s delicious lunch had been consumed by the time her watch beeped a second time. Another hour and another friend, both gone. Another choice to make. Verna looked at me expectantly. I felt short-changed of the proper ritual of memorial and burial by the manner of their deaths. Verna nodded, a silent affirmation that she stood with me in this ritual I chose.
“Rae used a Waring blender to style her hair every morning,” I said with a grin. “She dressed in the perfect business suits and the perfect pumps, God, she even owned a perfect string of real pearls. She could be cold and calculating and downright hard in a business deal, until ya looked above her neck. I teased her constantly that she needed stock in a glue factory to keep up that ‘do.”
Verna handed me another of her infamous chocolate chip cookies. “Your friends sound like such a contrast to you. How do you meet all these people?”
“Well, I was in accounting and finance for 25 years, before my surgery,” I said, holding up my cast. “Finance and accounting was what the World Trade Center was all about. Some of my friends who worked in that Plaza went all the way back to college, some I met at conferences and seminars and whatever. You know how I love to talk. I’ll sit down next to someone and, come Hell or high water, I’ll make friends. Hey, that’s how you and I met.” I chuckled. “Yeah, I wouldn’t shut up and neither would you and here we are. If I can get a person to talk…”
I nodded. “Rae could talk, oh, Rae could talk. I swear, if her charm and intelligence didn’t win over a client, she’d talk ‘em to death. I always wanted to ask her to show me how to do that with my hair.”
Both Verna and I laughed at the prospect of my thin, fine hair standing up in sharp spikes all over my head. That led me to the tale of the day I surprised Rae in her hotel room before the hair was up and running.
We were laughing about yet another hair story when Verna’s watch sounded off. The day was half over and I had covered three of my lost friends. I didn’t want to go on, but Harry’s voice rang in my ears. Harry was the only man I’d ever known who could referee a full-court basketball game without using a whistle. His booming baritone commanded the attention of all but the comatose. He was the most effective motivator and instructor I had experienced.
“His energy poured out of those blue eyes,” I told Verna. “His grandmother used to tease him as a child that he must have had two fathers, the one he looked like and another one who gave an Italian boy blue eyes. I never could figure out that one either, but those Roman features and blue eyes and olive skin and black hair had quite an effect on the ladies. He could hold anyone’s attention, but the females in the room also wanted to follow him home. I did once.” I cackled at Verna’s shocked reaction. “He was fifteen years younger than I was, you know I’m not into that. He had a terrible cold and two days of presentations ahead of him. I stopped by a health food store and followed him home with a bag full of vitamins and herbs.”
I detailed Harry’s initial resistance to my alternative medicine, which turned to amused interest after I explained the efficacy of each item I’d selected, based in no small part on my personal use. His amusement faded when he recovered in record time.
“He must have called me across the country at least once a day for weeks to discuss the application of this or that,” I said, “or to read me passages from the latest book he’d purchased. Within a month of this famous cold he owned blocks of stock in some of the major supplement manufacturers. He always threatened to leave me this stock, and I told him, no, leave it to your family so they’ll be healthy.
“So what’d he do, he bought me twenty shares from a company that did a triple stock split a week later. I called and told him I owed him a big, wet kiss the next time I saw him and he laughed so hard I thought he would drop the phone. That was at the end of August.”
“The kids Harry coached in basketball never wanted to hear that voice or see those blue eyes glaring at them. Harry would have made a great dad, if he had ever ‘gotten around to it’, his words. I should’ve introduced him to Darlena, who could nail a wastebasket across the room with a postage stamp.”
That reminded me of how Harry had recruited one star center when a gangly kid threw a balled-up napkin into an overflowing garbage can in Central Park, as the kid was running by at top speed. I launched into the story of attending with Harry this talented scholarship athlete’s graduation from a Pac-10 college, with Harry’s voice booming across the field as the young man accepted his diploma.
I paused at the end of this lad’s fairy tale that was thanks to Harry, and Verna’s watch sounded the end of another hour. I loved all of my friends, but the last two, they sat in the corner of my heart only a parent can know.
“Vanda worked two jobs to put her husband through college,” I began. “His career took off and they decided to start their family. She didn’t enter college until she was 33 years old. I don’t care what anyone says about starting school later and being more mature and settled and blah blah blah. Two kids, a house, the old man and his career, that ain’t easy, but Vanda managed. She went into labor with their third child four hours after collecting her diploma. She posted her resume` on a career website the day she and the baby came home from the hospital.”
I shook my head. “Who says we were in a recession. She got a call the next day and the company held open the interview process for ten days until Van could fit into the dress she wanted to wear. They offered her the job the same day she interviewed and held it open for six weeks. Talk about scrambling to get daycare together.” I giggled. “All the women on that floor gave her a party on her first day of work for being able to make it in. She worked there…well, 48 days later almost no one on that floor survived. Her 90-day probation hadn’t passed. She left no insurance, nothing, three beautiful children, one who will never know mama, and a husband who lost the person he called the sunshine in his universe.”
My voice caught and I blinked hard. Verna had the same moist eyes. We two mothers shared our tears as I read the letter Van’s husband had sent to all her friends, asking for our help in keeping his children’s mother alive in their tiny hearts.
“That’s actually how I met Van,” I continued, wiping my damp cheeks, “not through work, but through her oldest son, four years old at the time and very impatient with a delayed flight at the Denver airport. You know me,” I smiled, “I can out-talk a mere four-year-old. We were all fast friends by the time the weather cleared and our flights could leave.
“She called me once every week she was in school, usually to ask me a point of marketing or statistics or if I thought she was nuts being in college with kids half her age. I always told her that marketing would change by the time she was out of school, that any statistics class was only important to the professor teaching it, and yes, she was as crazy as a loon. I was so proud of her. Oh, God, three wee ones, so many children…” The tears were flowing again.
Verna passed me the second box of tissues and asked me to tell her about the vacation mentioned in the letter. I knew she was diverting my attention from the children and I was grateful. Halfway through chronicling our hilarious trek through Disney World, the watch beeped again.
Ask a mother who her favorite child is and she will look you straight in the eye and lie that she loves all her children equally. I wasn’t about to lie to Verna. Of all my lost friends I loved James best. He was one of my oldest friends, confidante and co-conspirator back to our earliest college days, cheerleader and study partner when we both returned to college after our time in Vietnam.
“Jimmy had every excuse in the book for not getting married and starting a family, even though he wanted one,” I said. “I called him on it all the time and he always had an answer. Sometimes a stupid answer,” I chuckled, “but an answer. Then all these problems were solved and finally, finally, he met a great woman, younger than us but still old enough for the biological clock to be screaming at both of them. They were lucky and conceived quickly and James Charles was born before their first anniversary.”
I launched into mother mode with my descriptions of this rosy-cheeked, green-eyed, tow-headed boy who was the perfect combination of his lovely mother and his handsome father. This boy, whose second birthday was September 1, 2001, was one more child I would keep in my heart and my prayers, in my life for as long as any of them would need me to remember.
Verna’s watch announced the sixth signal. I had tried to be calm and brave all day, succeeding at some times better than others, but now the tears flowed freely as we packed up our things in silence. I smoothed the covers on the bed and dropped the key on the dresser near the door. I unlocked my car and tossed my purse onto the passenger seat.
“Robin?” Verna said, and I looked up. “Have you ever thought about what Heaven must have been like on that day?”
“All the time.” I sighed. “All the time.”
September 22, 2001
We were both driving over 200 miles from our California homes, Verna from hers in Visalia in the Central Valley and I from mine in Santa Barbara on the South Central Coast. I arrived first at the small motel off the dusty two-lane Highway 41. My left hand throbbed from swelling under the bright purple cast. I rummaged through my purse for the pain pills, knowing I could take only one for the time we would be there, and then I would need to be alert for the long drive home. It had been only 33 days since my surgery August 20th and eleven days since the world had changed. I had no sooner opened the door to our room than Verna’s van pulled up next to my car.
She set down her large picnic cooler inside the door and hugged me. Neither one of us wanted to let go. Tears filled my eyes at the reason why we had made this plan to meet halfway. Was I ready to face painful memories? Having come so far I had to be up for this. I started to sit down on the edge of the bed and my weak knees gave out.
Verna handed me a bottle of cold water and sat down on the other bed across from me. She started to unpack the cooler. I smiled slightly. She had also brought extra tissues. “You’re in a lot of pain,” she said, folding a pillow in half to stuff under my cast arm. “This isn’t easy for either of us.” Verna was primary caregiver to her two toddler great-grandchildren, and she could only be away from home for a short time and only on the weekend. Yet she chose to be with me, to support me in my desire to remember my friends. “Tell me about David. Isn’t he the one who, well, talks to you?”
I had to smile. “David’s voice has been in my ear since the day we met. I tend to be a little impulsive.” Verna rolled her eyes and my smile widened. “Yeah, well, impatient, too, that’s how we met. We were attending an accounting conference and I couldn’t comprehend a specific point. David had this orderly mind; he could cut to the bottom line so fast. He’d say in that slow methodical way of his, ‘now, Robin, you take blah blah blah and you blah blah and you get blah blah blah’. It always amazed me how he could visualize the steps of anything. Any time I’d get impatient, I’d hear David saying, ‘now, Robin…”. He was the steadiest human being I’ve ever known.” I took a swallow of water to calm my shaky voice. “I hear him now. He’s chiding me for driving all this way one-handed.”
Verna nodded. “I’d have to agree to that. I told you I thought it would be too much for you. I’d like you to tell me how a few simple words from this man could make the Robin I know calm down.”
I chuckled. “David was an exceptional young man. I’ll never forget the day I gave him a green striped shirt and flowered tie. I thought Mr. Starched White Shirt and Plain Black Tie was going to lose his eyeballs on the desk.” I shook my head. “Then I made him go to the men’s room and change into my selections. I gotta say, he looked great, and I’ve never seen anyone more uncomfortable with clothes on.”
Verna snickered. “You’ve seen him without clothes?”
I had to fight from choking on a swallow of water. The thought of seeing the very proper David in the altogether was comical beyond words. Verna leaned over and put a hand on my arm at my sudden change of expression. I would never see David again, in or out of clothes. I took a deep breath and then burst out laughing at the mental image of David naked but for that loud flowered tie. He would’ve blushed to his receding hairline. I shared this vision with Verna and we both giggled like naughty schoolgirls. I took great comfort from sharing my lost friend with another friend.
The alarm on Verna’s watch went off as I was regaling her with the tenth tale of how the staid David ever hooked up with a lunatic like me. I had been talking for an hour. Now I needed to put David aside, if only for the remainder of our day. I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“Darlena met David at the last seminar we all attended,” I said. “I purposely introduced them so David could be the voice of reason in her life and Darlena could help the stuffed shirt learn how to laugh. Oh, that girl could laugh. Her giggle could turn vinegar to honey. She would laugh at nothing and because of anything. I really loved that about her. It reminded me of when I was her age and my father told me I laughed in all the wrong places."
Verna frowned. “There is no wrong place to laugh.”
“Thank you! Exactly what I always told my father. When I met Darlena’s father, it became clear where she learned to be tickled at the world. She was a long-awaited only child. Her parents figured she might be the only one, so Darryl and Lena named her after them both. That’s how we met, at a seminar where she overheard me telling the story of how I got my name. By the end of our name stories we were fast friends, laughing and carrying on like sisters. One of our workshop leaders thought we were sisters. That made her laugh all the more and I started laughing and, oh, boy, we were a couple of nuts. One day she called me from the Bahamas…”
Half of Verna’s delicious lunch had been consumed by the time her watch beeped a second time. Another hour and another friend, both gone. Another choice to make. Verna looked at me expectantly. I felt short-changed of the proper ritual of memorial and burial by the manner of their deaths. Verna nodded, a silent affirmation that she stood with me in this ritual I chose.
“Rae used a Waring blender to style her hair every morning,” I said with a grin. “She dressed in the perfect business suits and the perfect pumps, God, she even owned a perfect string of real pearls. She could be cold and calculating and downright hard in a business deal, until ya looked above her neck. I teased her constantly that she needed stock in a glue factory to keep up that ‘do.”
Verna handed me another of her infamous chocolate chip cookies. “Your friends sound like such a contrast to you. How do you meet all these people?”
“Well, I was in accounting and finance for 25 years, before my surgery,” I said, holding up my cast. “Finance and accounting was what the World Trade Center was all about. Some of my friends who worked in that Plaza went all the way back to college, some I met at conferences and seminars and whatever. You know how I love to talk. I’ll sit down next to someone and, come Hell or high water, I’ll make friends. Hey, that’s how you and I met.” I chuckled. “Yeah, I wouldn’t shut up and neither would you and here we are. If I can get a person to talk…”
I nodded. “Rae could talk, oh, Rae could talk. I swear, if her charm and intelligence didn’t win over a client, she’d talk ‘em to death. I always wanted to ask her to show me how to do that with my hair.”
Both Verna and I laughed at the prospect of my thin, fine hair standing up in sharp spikes all over my head. That led me to the tale of the day I surprised Rae in her hotel room before the hair was up and running.
We were laughing about yet another hair story when Verna’s watch sounded off. The day was half over and I had covered three of my lost friends. I didn’t want to go on, but Harry’s voice rang in my ears. Harry was the only man I’d ever known who could referee a full-court basketball game without using a whistle. His booming baritone commanded the attention of all but the comatose. He was the most effective motivator and instructor I had experienced.
“His energy poured out of those blue eyes,” I told Verna. “His grandmother used to tease him as a child that he must have had two fathers, the one he looked like and another one who gave an Italian boy blue eyes. I never could figure out that one either, but those Roman features and blue eyes and olive skin and black hair had quite an effect on the ladies. He could hold anyone’s attention, but the females in the room also wanted to follow him home. I did once.” I cackled at Verna’s shocked reaction. “He was fifteen years younger than I was, you know I’m not into that. He had a terrible cold and two days of presentations ahead of him. I stopped by a health food store and followed him home with a bag full of vitamins and herbs.”
I detailed Harry’s initial resistance to my alternative medicine, which turned to amused interest after I explained the efficacy of each item I’d selected, based in no small part on my personal use. His amusement faded when he recovered in record time.
“He must have called me across the country at least once a day for weeks to discuss the application of this or that,” I said, “or to read me passages from the latest book he’d purchased. Within a month of this famous cold he owned blocks of stock in some of the major supplement manufacturers. He always threatened to leave me this stock, and I told him, no, leave it to your family so they’ll be healthy.
“So what’d he do, he bought me twenty shares from a company that did a triple stock split a week later. I called and told him I owed him a big, wet kiss the next time I saw him and he laughed so hard I thought he would drop the phone. That was at the end of August.”
“The kids Harry coached in basketball never wanted to hear that voice or see those blue eyes glaring at them. Harry would have made a great dad, if he had ever ‘gotten around to it’, his words. I should’ve introduced him to Darlena, who could nail a wastebasket across the room with a postage stamp.”
That reminded me of how Harry had recruited one star center when a gangly kid threw a balled-up napkin into an overflowing garbage can in Central Park, as the kid was running by at top speed. I launched into the story of attending with Harry this talented scholarship athlete’s graduation from a Pac-10 college, with Harry’s voice booming across the field as the young man accepted his diploma.
I paused at the end of this lad’s fairy tale that was thanks to Harry, and Verna’s watch sounded the end of another hour. I loved all of my friends, but the last two, they sat in the corner of my heart only a parent can know.
“Vanda worked two jobs to put her husband through college,” I began. “His career took off and they decided to start their family. She didn’t enter college until she was 33 years old. I don’t care what anyone says about starting school later and being more mature and settled and blah blah blah. Two kids, a house, the old man and his career, that ain’t easy, but Vanda managed. She went into labor with their third child four hours after collecting her diploma. She posted her resume` on a career website the day she and the baby came home from the hospital.”
I shook my head. “Who says we were in a recession. She got a call the next day and the company held open the interview process for ten days until Van could fit into the dress she wanted to wear. They offered her the job the same day she interviewed and held it open for six weeks. Talk about scrambling to get daycare together.” I giggled. “All the women on that floor gave her a party on her first day of work for being able to make it in. She worked there…well, 48 days later almost no one on that floor survived. Her 90-day probation hadn’t passed. She left no insurance, nothing, three beautiful children, one who will never know mama, and a husband who lost the person he called the sunshine in his universe.”
My voice caught and I blinked hard. Verna had the same moist eyes. We two mothers shared our tears as I read the letter Van’s husband had sent to all her friends, asking for our help in keeping his children’s mother alive in their tiny hearts.
“That’s actually how I met Van,” I continued, wiping my damp cheeks, “not through work, but through her oldest son, four years old at the time and very impatient with a delayed flight at the Denver airport. You know me,” I smiled, “I can out-talk a mere four-year-old. We were all fast friends by the time the weather cleared and our flights could leave.
“She called me once every week she was in school, usually to ask me a point of marketing or statistics or if I thought she was nuts being in college with kids half her age. I always told her that marketing would change by the time she was out of school, that any statistics class was only important to the professor teaching it, and yes, she was as crazy as a loon. I was so proud of her. Oh, God, three wee ones, so many children…” The tears were flowing again.
Verna passed me the second box of tissues and asked me to tell her about the vacation mentioned in the letter. I knew she was diverting my attention from the children and I was grateful. Halfway through chronicling our hilarious trek through Disney World, the watch beeped again.
Ask a mother who her favorite child is and she will look you straight in the eye and lie that she loves all her children equally. I wasn’t about to lie to Verna. Of all my lost friends I loved James best. He was one of my oldest friends, confidante and co-conspirator back to our earliest college days, cheerleader and study partner when we both returned to college after our time in Vietnam.
“Jimmy had every excuse in the book for not getting married and starting a family, even though he wanted one,” I said. “I called him on it all the time and he always had an answer. Sometimes a stupid answer,” I chuckled, “but an answer. Then all these problems were solved and finally, finally, he met a great woman, younger than us but still old enough for the biological clock to be screaming at both of them. They were lucky and conceived quickly and James Charles was born before their first anniversary.”
I launched into mother mode with my descriptions of this rosy-cheeked, green-eyed, tow-headed boy who was the perfect combination of his lovely mother and his handsome father. This boy, whose second birthday was September 1, 2001, was one more child I would keep in my heart and my prayers, in my life for as long as any of them would need me to remember.
Verna’s watch announced the sixth signal. I had tried to be calm and brave all day, succeeding at some times better than others, but now the tears flowed freely as we packed up our things in silence. I smoothed the covers on the bed and dropped the key on the dresser near the door. I unlocked my car and tossed my purse onto the passenger seat.
“Robin?” Verna said, and I looked up. “Have you ever thought about what Heaven must have been like on that day?”
“All the time.” I sighed. “All the time.”