9-16-01, Side Streets, Kimra Traynor Herb, 946 words
All about perspective
By Kimra Traynor Herb
IPS Features
It's all about perspective. Perspective, as I learned it in private art lessons as a teen, is the point from which you view. At the time, this was a hard concept for me to grasp, and as I painted my endless oils of trees, rivers and mountains, the roads never seemed to trail off small enough..... nor were the trees nearest to the eye large enough... I couldn't get the perspective right. This week I got perspective right.
I was having a
quasi-cruddy week. My youngest came down with a whopping case of chicken pox; an
illness I THOUGHT I had had him vaccinated against (oops, turns out I didn't),
and the sickness had left him covered in blisters, feverish, nauseous, coughing,
and unable to sleep. By Tuesday, he had been up for two nights straight, and I
was pretty nearly worthless.
The house
reflected the fact that the two of us had been virtual prisoners of chicken pox;
empty Sprite cans on the kitchen counter, bottles of calamine lotion sitting on
the table, and the ever present box of children's Tylenol and Benadryl handy on
top of the fridge. I was, I'll admit it, having a pity party for myself because
as a social bird, it is hard for me to spend days on end cooped up in the house
without any contact from the outside world.
I was also quite
tired from the night runs to give him a shower to help cease the itching, to
administer more lotion, and to dispense more Tylenol. I literally had the shakes
from lack of sleep, as my husband was out of town on business and I was manning
the bad ship Chicken Pox myself.
Drained beyond
imagination, I selected a movie and told my son what fun it would be if the two
of us pulled out the sleeper sofa in the office, and watched the movie on the
television in there. Luckily, for me, he was gung-ho, and I imagined myself
sleeping blissfully for 90 minutes while he enjoyed The Emperors New Groove.
This was about 7:45 a.m., Central Time. I had just fallen off, sort of, when I
heard the phone ring.
No message so I
decided I would not get up from my much needed snooze and check the caller i.d.
A few minutes later the phone rang again, Darn! I couldn't sleep with all this
going on.... and it was my mother on the machine. I heard her voice say
something about "Do you know what is going on.... and then something about
a "crazy" and "airplane into a building." Suddenly, I was
awake. Wide awake.
Leaving my son
in front of his movie, I ran into the living room and turned on the television,
just in time to see the second airplane crashing into the World Trade Center.
Was this one of those bad Japanese movies? Would Godzilla come careening around
the corner at an moment to knock down more buildings?
I blinked,
looked again, and listened in horror as the truth of the moment unraveled in
front of my sleep-deprived eyes. The rest of the morning was as surreal as that
first moment in front of the television. Sobering, horrifying..... I felt my
eyes fill again and again as I watched the reality which was almost
incomprehensible in its devastation.
Suffice it to
say, my perspective changed that morning. My child's sickness; my inability to
socialize.... the fact that my husband had DARED to go out of town on business
while I was nursing an ill family member......well, this was all just not
important. How lucky I was that all of my family was alive.....and how I grieved
for those who had suffered so immeasurably that I could only pray.... so deep
was my horror and inability to help.
When my two
older sons returned from school, they had the excitement of the day clinging to
them like a scent. "Did you see?!" My middle son practically yelled,
as he ran into the door, "Someone crashed two hijacked planes into the
World Trade Center, and another into the Pentagon! We got to watch it on
television!" When my older son returned from band, he said, "Some of
the teachers let us talk about what was going on, and watch television..... but
not our band director.... no, if our high school was one block from the World
Trade Center, he'd have us marching around in the rubble."
"Don't you
realize," I asked them both, "that THOUSANDS of people have
died?! This is SERIOUS!"
Their faces, as
they turned to me (I rarely yell) revealed that yes, they understood the
magnitude of the situation, but also, as a teenager and pre-teen, the
major impact the tragedy had on them was how it had altered their school days.
Remembering my own confused reaction to the nightly news of the Vietnam War in
its waning days while I was a child, I gentled my approach and allowed them to
go finish their homework, no more lectures from mom.
Time has passed;
more has been revealed, and the horror continues. Viewing the world from this
new perspective, I am crushed to realize how shallow and ineffective I have been
as human being lately.
I am amazed in
awe at our national leaders, who have banded together in a show of unity and
strength which seems to have left all the bitterness of the previous election in
the dust. I am proud to be an American now more than ever, and I hope that even
after the horror of this national tragedy begins to fade; my new perspective
will stay true.