I need a secretary. Somebody to keep me organized and on-schedule, any volunteers? I got up, got dressed, got my Starbucks and showed up at the high school today, all prepared to teach math again, only to discover that I’m scheduled for tomorrow.

Tim is the one who told me, as we were walking into the high school. I said something about it being an early release day and he put a hand on my shoulder and said, “You look really cute, today, honey, but tomorrow is the early release day. Today is 9/11, remember?”

“Okay,” I said, turned and shuffled off.

Of course, I knew it was 9/11. As I showered this morning I thought of all the ways in which our lives have changed in six short years.

When I was growing up everyone used to ask, “Where were you when JFK was killed?” Our family had just moved to Hawaii. We were living in a high-rise in Waikiki, as we waited for our belongings to arrive from the Mainland.

I was out with brother Frankie, running up and down the walkway between the front doors of the apartments when I heard Mama and a neighbor lady discussing JFK’s death. I recall watching the funeral later with our family. Daddy sat on the edge of the coffee table, Mama sat on the floor next to him, leaning on his right leg. Linda sat between his feet. I leaned in from the other side. The thing that interested me most was Carolyn and John, and how it was that fathers could die while their children were still little. Up until then I didn’t know of any kids who didn’t have a daddy around.

We left Hawaii in June, 1966, about six weeks before my father was killed in Vietnam. I did not return to the islands until 2001. Ashley and Shelby had graduated high school that year. I planned to take my daughters to Hawaii. It would be an opportunity to take them to the places I had last walked with my father. I asked, begged, Mama to come with us. She refused. Tim didn’t want to go. So we made it a girls trip – Konnie, Shelby and Ashley. Stephan says I didn’t invite him but I’m sure I did and he just didn’t want to go because his daddy wasn’t going.

At one time in my life I was pretty organized, so I planned out the entire trip. Hotels. Transportation. Trip to Pearl Harbor. Trip to the old neighborhood. To Schofield Barracks. Trip to the North Shores. Trip to China Town, where daughter Ashley got the most precise haircut she’s ever been given.  Trip to the zoo. And snorkeling. We crammed it all into eight short days. With our final trip – to Punchbowl – the final resting place for many of those killed at Pearl Harbor. My father had taken us there to pay his respects to the war dead.

We sat beneath a banyan tree and watched a military funeral – something that my daughters had never seen before. It was 9/10/01.

The next morning we woke early – all but Konnie – to watch the sunrise over Diamond Head. We were due to fly out that morning. There would be no more sunsets for us to watch.

Ashley and Shelby posed for photos with Diamond Head in the background. I noticed clusters of people gathered around the beach. I thought it strange that so many people were up so early. But other than a few hushed whispers, and the swish-swish of the constant tide, the beach was quiet.   

We combed over the rocks that form the pier at Waikiki. A gray-headed woman sat on the rocks, her elbows resting on her knees. We stood near her, expectantly waiting on the sun to rise, still unaware of the death clouds that had exploded over New York City, DC, and Pennsylvania.

“Have you heard?” the lady asked. She had a Brooklyn accent.

“Heard what?” I asked, surprised to be greeted so early by a stranger.

“Somebody bombed the World Trade Center,” she said.

I didn’t flinch. The World Trade Center had been bombed before. I was a reporter. Used to hearing headline news. Not much startled me. I wasn’t immune to the hurts of others, but I wasn’t all that surprised by it either.

“Do they know who did it?” I asked.

“Nah,” she replied. “But they bombed the Pentagon, too.”

I sucked air, rapidly. The lady might as well have taken a baseball bat and socked me in the gut. I was a military daughter. The Pentagon was holy ground. Who and how did anyone get close enough to bomb the Pentagon?

I knew in that moment that if somebody could bomb the Pentagon then nothing, no one was safe, period. Ashley and Shelby were studying my face. My blanched look told them that something was terribly awry. The lady continued, “All planes have been grounded, nationwide. There’s no flights in or out.”

We all looked skyward, toward the airport. The waves continued to sway back and forth, like a choir member at a memorial service, but the lavender sky was still as a dead child laid out for the viewing.

The lady continued to talk, to tell me how she worked at the Trade Center, how she had friends there, how she had grown up in New York and how she just couldn’t believe all this. I wish I’d stopped her long enough to get her name. I never got her name.

So much has changed in six short years. I feel like I’ve been sitting in the middle of the Umatilla River as spring runoff rushes by, cutting a sharp course for the Columbia. In 2001, I hadn’t given any consideration to traveling to DC, much less to Vietnam. My children all lived at home. My son was engaged, and my daughters weren’t. Tim and I never imagined a time when we would be estranged from any of our children. It was unthinkable to us.

Our lives weren’t global. We worked our jobs, raised our family, attended our local church. I was not involved with any veteran groups, or with any Gold Star families, shoot, I had not even, yet, visited the Vietnam Memorial Wall, where my father’s name was etched in Panel 9E. It would be another year -- on the 20^th anniversary – before I would go.  

Our friends who gave us shelter in Hawaii following 9/11, Matt and Jan, still had both of their beautiful children. The oldest, a boy, 16, was killed in a farm truck accident this summer. And our friends David and Sarah were looking forward to the birth of their first child, unaware that one day their precious girl would be the catalyst for child abuse reform in the state of Oregon.

I’ve witnessed enough sorrow over the past six years to last me a lifetime. From the 21-year-old war widow in North Carolina who spends her sleepless nights, peeking out from behind the blinds, listening for intruders who never come, to the Vietnam veterans valiantly fighting old demons and new illnesses, to the mothers and fathers who have outlived their daughters and sons. I’ve wept buckets for my own child who has turned away from us as if she had never been truly loved, and for all the soldiers, dead and maimed, who turned their faces bravely toward the fight, because to them, honor and love is about sacrifice.

You’d think such weeping would rust an old soul. Roughen a heart, make it coarse.

But it hasn’t. Instead it has freed me to live a life more fully aware.

Aware that if such things as 9/11, as children without parents, and parents without children, or a faith forgotten or horribly neglected, or countries at war in the name of a God, abused, aren’t worth crying over, somebody pray tell me, what is?