Remembering 9/11 - Love is the Way

Ten years ago, my then boyfriend, Brent Britton, took me to Hawaii for my 34^th birthday and asked me to marry him.  The date was August 25, 2001.  Brent moved later that week from San Francisco to New York to live with me in my loft apartment in DUMBO, (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) in Brooklyn just across the Brooklyn Bridge from the World Trade Center. 

Brent had been living with me in New York for about a week when we woke up on the morning of September 9, and I suggested that we walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and go to the top of the World Trade Center.  I had been living in New York for 9 years at that time, but had not done that since I was a kid.  Brent had never been to the top of the World Trade Center, and being Brent, he greeted that suggestion with all the verve and excitement for life with which he greets everything.  Within a short time we were off.

Here is a picture of us at The World Trade Center on September 9, 2001, roughly 36 hours before it would be attacked and destroyed by terrorists.  We waited on long lines to get on the oversized elevators to go to the top of the building.  We bought popcorn and took in the amazing views. After a time, as we would have to wait on another long line to get on the elevators to leave the building, I told Brent that I was beginning to feel claustrophobic, and wanted to get going.  He said he felt the same way, and so we went and waited in the line for a down elevator.  

Less than two days later, on the morning of September 11, Brent got up early to go to LaGuardia Airport to take the 8:30 a.m. shuttle to Boston for a meeting.  That morning as I lay in bed sleeping, I heard someone walking on the roof, something I noted as odd, because except for someone smoking an occasional cigarette, there was rarely anyone walking on the roof, and certainly not early in the morning.  Our loft was on the top floor of 81 Washington Street, and from the roof you could see Manhattan. 

I now know that I left for work right around the time that the first plane hit.  When I exited our building and made my made way up the street, had I glanced to the right, I would likely have seen the WTC in flames.  However, in a hurry to get to my midtown office by 9:00 a.m., I turned quickly to the left out of my building and headed to the F train.  That was sometime around 8:45 a.m. 

As I was walking to the subway down the cobbled Brooklyn street, a man who had that CIA agent look crossed diagonally in front of me very purposely heading in the other direction.  I took note of him because it was unusual, in that most people in my neighborhood would be heading towards the train at the time, not the other direction.  Also, DUMBO was an artists’ colony and there was not a lot of 9 to 5 foot traffic in the morning.  In retrospect, he may have been a government agent checking the skies for the hijacked planes.  I also suspect that someone from law enforcement was on the roof of my and probably other buildings that morning checking the skies for the planes that had been hijacked.

My subway must have been the last or one of the last ones that ran from Brooklyn to Manhattan that day.  While I was on the train, a garbled message was playing, but all that the passengers could make out was something to the effect of “there has been an incident at the World Trade Center.”  We had no idea what was going on.

When I got to work, I went straight to my office and began listening to my voicemail messages, like I would on any other day.  The first message was from my secretary, Maria.  Her voice was frantic and she said that a plane from Boston had crashed into the World Trade Center and that my mom had called wanting to know if Brent and I were alright.  My heart started beating a million miles a minute. My mind was racing, thinking, was the plane coming from Boston or going to Boston. 

I tried to reach Brent on his cell phone, but the lines were jammed.  I ran to my secretary and asked her if the plane was coming from Boston or going to Boston.  She said she did not know.  I ran back to my office and continued listening to voicemail messages.  The next message was from Brent.  He had gotten one call out to me to tell me that his plane was headed back to the airport because a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

I was momentarily relieved although there was still confusion as to whether Brent’s plane was in the air or was grounded.  I later learned that his plane never took off, and that he and the other passengers on his plane watched the towers burn from the tarmac. 

I went to the conference room where my co-workers were watching the towers burn on television. I had watched the World Trade Center aflame from this same office with many of these same colleagues in 1993 when terrorists had planted a bomb in a van and parked it in the parking garage of the building.  I worked at that law firm from 1992 through 2003, and when you work someplace that long and have so many experiences together, your coworkers become in many ways like a family to you. 

Since the two planes had hit, we knew that this was not an accident.  This was another terrorist attack.  We all stood in the conference room and watched in shock and disbelief as both towers burned.  If people were talking, I don’t remember it.  No one was sitting.  We all stood.

I was watching the towers burn, and in the instant before the first tower fell, I saw something, and I thought in complete horror, something is happening.  I perceived that I saw a kind of clear bubbling moments before the first tower actually began to collapse.  I would swear to you that I knew the tower was going to fall a second before it actually began to implode.  It is weird because I have since watched television specials about 9/11 and I realize that you can not actually see anything, no clear-colored bubble sensation in the seconds before the tower fell, but on that day, I saw it.  Perhaps that is the way my brain translated it, giving me a few seconds to psychologically prepare for something so unthinkable.

At that moment, I knew all of those people trapped inside had died. The faces of the people I had seen two days earlier flashed in my head – the man working at the elevator, the woman who sold us the popcorn.  Were they inside?  Had they died? I ran into  another room to be alone, and I cried uncontrollably. 

My disbelief deepened as I thought, it’s just a matter of time until the other tower falls, and then all of those people will be dead. 

And that is exactly what happened.  Nothing could make it better.  You could not say to yourself, this is just a movie or this is just a dream.

At that point, there was a shift in people’s thinking from shock and horror to personal survival.  New York was being attacked.  D.C. was being attacked.  Cell phone service was out.  The subways were not running.  We had heard that there were other planes.  People were talking about whether more high rises would be hit.  Would bridges be hit?  We did not know what else was going to happen. 

People needed to get home, and that meant walking.  Thousands upon thousands of people began the trek to get home.  Those of us who lived in Brooklyn and Queens walked over the 59^th Street Bridge in a mass exodus shoulder to shoulder with literally thousands of others. 

We kept hearing and seeing fighter jets, and every time we would hear one, people would flinch.  We did not know if those were enemy planes heading for New York’s bridges.  We would later learn that those were U.S. fighter jets ordered to scramble to protect us from further attacks, but on that day, we had no way of knowing. 

I walked for more than three hours over the bridge, through Queens and down to Brooklyn.  In Brooklyn, some local subways were running free of charge.  I took a train part of the way.  There were people everywhere.  Americans are survivors and fighters, and New Yorkers are a special breed of Americans.  We were stunned.  But we were all determined to get where we were going.  To get home, to process what was happening to us, and to regroup.

When I finally made it to Brooklyn, the view of lower Manhattan from DUMBO was staggering—it was covered in a cloud of billowing smoke, and the most prominent features of the downtown skyline, the twin towers, were gone. People were already wearing face masks, and I remember wondering where had people gotten those masks?   Here is some footage Brent took that morning before I returned home.

Inside our loft, Brent met me at the door. I cried and we embraced for several minutes.  Brent was there with several other passengers from his flight to Boston who lived in lower Manhattan, but could not reenter the City.

In one of those six-degrees of separation moments, Brent and I had planned to attend a wedding the following week at which we would have met Mark Bingham, one of the best friends of one of Brent’s best friends.  That wedding had to be postponed, and we were never to meet Mark.  He was one of 9/11’s most brave and amazing heroes as part of the “Let’s Roll” team that crashed Flight 93 before it hit its intended target and as a result undoubtedly saved many lives that day.

* * *

The stark contrast between the happy picture of Brent and me as a newly engaged, madly in love couple at the top of the World Trade Center on September 9, 2001, and the footage of lower Manhattan drenched in death-filled smoke two days later represents a full spectrum from good to evil in my mind.  How do you make sense of it all?

I remember speaking to one of my best friends who had a baby shortly after 9/11 and asking her if she was scared to bring a baby into this world.  Her words struck me.  She told me no, she emphatically believed it was necessary to bring more good souls into this world.

In the months following 9/11, there were many times when unmarked packages or bomb scares closed the subways and rendered New Yorkers unable to go to work.  Brent and I spent many days together inside our loft, stunned by what had happened, still madly in love nonetheless and determined like many other New Yorkers and Americans not to let evil win.

As I am fond of telling anyone who will listen, Brent and I married three months later in a beach on Hawaii with one of those additional good souls on board.  Our super scion son was born September 6, 2002.

This year we celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, the ninth birthday of our son and the fifth birthday of our fiery-red-headed daughter.  We will also remember the 10^th anniversary of September 11th. 

This is what I tell myself: no one of us knows where we came from or why we are here.  We have our faiths, our hopes and our beliefs, but no one of us knows what tomorrow will bring.  There is evil in the world.  There is also magic, in that people can love each other, and people in love can come together and create life. 

So, love the people in your life every day with the same fierce bravery that the heroes in New York, in D.C. and on Flight 93 displayed on 9/11 no matter what, and love is sure to win.

Darkness and Light

Here are two poems.  I wrote the first one half-asleep at 4 o'clock one morning.  The act of writing “Pull the Cord” helped me gain some clarity about a difficult situation in my life.  I feel compelled to say that it is not about the one and only Brent Britton, love of my life, my handsome husband.  If anyone else should like it or the words should help someone else, that would make me happy. 

Pull the Cord

Pulling, and pulling, and pulling the cord

let the wind whisper, pull it some more,

pull on the canvas, pull on it tight

feel the wind ripple, feel the wind roar,

there is the pain and there is the fear

let the wind wash it, take it and soar,

pull on it, pull on it, pull on it tight

let it bounce in the waves and the light,

pulling, and pulling, and pulling the chord

something is happening, something’s no more.

Pull on it, pull on it, make it feel tight

pull on it, pull on it, all of your might,

pull on it, hold it, the canvas so tight

pull on it, pull on it, stand in the light,

then release it, release it, release it, let go,

feel the breeze wash you, feel the pain flow

I love you, I love you, I love you

no more.

The second one is about my beautiful, red-headed daughter, Skylar.  I wrote it on my iPhone one spring afternoon while I was sitting in car-line waiting to pick up sweet Connor Kai, as then three-year old Skylar slept in the back seat.

Skylar

Brighter than the brightest blue,
against the full green trees waving in the spring air,
you lighten my days and make me feel happy and alive,
a sudden fiery storm, you crash and thrash around my world,
your will determined and unstoppable, like a hurricane,
and then you're a sleeping angel, so calm and perfect,
where did you come from, and how could you be so sweetly intricate?
when you wake tomorrow, no matter the forecast, I will love you
whether and forever you go, my Sky.

Coming soon.  A discussion about poetry, why I love it, and a detailed analysis of my favorite poem.  Happy day fellow earth dwellers!

What's in a Name?

Why did I choose the name "Britton Beat" as the title of my blog, you ask?  Ok, you didn't ask, but Imma tell you anyway.  If you guessed that I selected the name "Britton" to represent the last name I took on December 14, 2001, the date on which I married the one and only Brent Britton a/k/a the "handsome husband," on a beach in Hawaii during a solar eclipse, you would be absolutely correct.  If you also guessed that I chose the word "Beat" as an obvious nod to the time-honored title of numerous news publications including, but by no means limited to, "Tiger Beat," the 1970s gossip rag from which I gleaned everything a tweenage girl needed to know about her heartthrobs – Shaun Cassidy, Leif Garrett and the Bay City Rollers – you would also be right.

My choice, however, of the name "Britton Beat" is also meant as an homage to two musical groups, English Beat (a/k/a the “Beat”) and Londonbeat.  English Beat sang such awesome tunes as “Twist and Crawl,”  “Save it for Later,” and my personal favorite, "Mirror in the Bathroom," which I, for most of the 80s, thought said, "Meet her in the Bathroom."  When you misapprehend song lyrics, as I often do, you get to witness a rebirth of sorts of your favorite songs when upon learning the actual lyrics, you discover fresh meanings.  

For example, just recently, I thought the song "Cooler than Me" by break-out artist Mike Posner crooned:

I used to parlor my tricks, I hope that you like this,
but you probably don't, you think you're cooler than me.

I thought it was artful that the songwriter had changed the word “parlor” from the phrase “parlor tricks” into a verb and juxtaposed language from a different era with the rest of the lyrics in the modern pop song.  I imagined what elaborate sleight of hand the singer had attempted in order to demonstrate to the object of his desire that he was in fact cool.  All this, until I learned from my husband that the song actually goes like this:

I've used up all of my tricks, I hope that you like this...

I’m not even going to tell you what I thought the words to Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s “Blinded by the Light” were, but in my defense, I think that song is sung with purposeful lyrical ambiguity. I still dig that “Cooler than Me” song though, and continue to belt it out at top volume in the car with my three favorite people, Brent and our two kidz, as a sort of spontaneously arisen Britton summer anthem, last year’s being “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black Eyed Peas.  

Getting back to the “Beat” bands: Londonbeat, a band formed after English Beat, was perhaps a poorly named band, which, had they chosen a different name, might have been a bigger commercial success.  After all, English Beat was already a wildly popular ska band for more than a decade when Londonbeat was formed in the early 1990s.  I feel that calling yourself "Londonbeat” in this context is kind of like saying, "Well, we're sort of like English Beat, but we don't plan to be as big as those guys", kind of like, "we're a city to their nation-state."  (If you reread the previous sentence in an English accent, it makes a lot more sense).  Well, and that's kind of the way it played out, right?  I mean, you probably remember English Beat, but you probably don't remember Londonbeat.  Do you, however, remember Londonbeat's catchy tune, "I've Been Thinking About You?"  

You may be asking yourself why I remember Londonbeat, and that's a good question.  Well, you see, on one hot summer night long ago in, I think, 1991, I was in New York, visiting from law school in D.C.  My friends and I had been hanging out at a bar in SoHo called Lucky Strike.  On the walk back to my friend’s apartment, some guys approached us and began chatting us up.  

As anyone who knows me can attest, at the beginning of the night, I am the life of the party, but after a few hours, I get tired, my brain starts shutting down, and basically the night is over.  So I was only half listening as these guys told us that they were in a band called "Londonbeat," and that they had just finished their first world tour.  Tired and somewhat grumpy, I assumed they were just trying to impress us by convincing us that they were in a famous band, but I thought that, in their zeal to win us over, they had mistaken the name of the band.  So I said rather sarcastically, "I think you mean English Beat."  

To which they replied, "No, Londonbeat."  I mean, they must have gotten this all the time, don’t you think?  

We didn't believe them, so we left and went home to my friend's apartment.  There, we checked on the Londonbeat CD jewel case (my friend actually happened to own it), and – surprise surprise – staring back at us from the CD cover were the guys we had just met.  So we went back to Lucky Strike.  Hey, it’s not every day you get to hang out with someone who has a video on MTV.  They were very cool, and fun was had by all.  

And so you have the evolution of a blog name.  Tiger Beat, a glossy tweenage gossip rag from the 70s; English Beat, a band with a song I loved but misunderstood in the 80s; Londonbeat, a potentially poorly-named band whose lead singer I met in the 90s; Britain, a synonym for England; Britton, a homophone of Britain, and my name after marrying Brent Britton, the best husband a girl could ever ask for, in 2001; all culminating in the name of my blog for the 2010s: Britton Beat.  

I hope you like it! Thanks for reading!

Back to the Chalk Board, School Board

Last year was my son’s first year at Roosevelt Elementary School. Great school, great year, great teacher. I was surprised to learn that he had numerous half days regularly throughout the year. Every parent I talked to about the half days thought they were harmful to the children’s education. The children had less time for learning, and working parents were in difficult straits on those days. The other night, I attended a parents’ Forum to Discuss Half Days @ Hillsborough County Schools. I am writing because I believe this is a critical time in history to be determining this issue.

Other countries, for example, Japan and France, have schooling year-round. In this way, children retain information in a continuous manner as they do not forget what they have learned over a lengthy three month summer. Indeed, the historical reason for a three month summer is because the United States was primarily an agricultural economy, and people were needed to help with farming and ranching over the summer months. Districts around the country are looking at whether school years need to be lengthened and in some cases, school is in session year-round. We want our children to have the best education possible so that the United States can continue to effectively compete in a global economy. In Florida, we want to provide the best education system to attract the best and the brightest to our great State. I believe that these are the lofty goals that the Hillsborough County School Board should be debating. We should be reviewing proposals to lengthen our school year to improve our educational system, not looking at rolling back our school week to 4 ½ days. A five day school week is a baseline which we should be improving upon, not cutting back.

Surprisingly, only one School Board member attended the meeting. While parents packed a room in Hyde Park, and while well over 1000 people have signed onto the Facebook page titled “Parents Against Half Days at Hillsborough County Schools,” the majority of the School Board did not attend. One thing that seems clear after last night’s meeting is that the parents’ voice is missing from the School Board’s decision-making process.

At the meeting, parents were told that the reason for the half days was that teachers had insufficient planning time. Parents asked numerous, pointed questions to try to illuminate the need for taking time away from our children’s education. For example, parents asked on what criteria, research or data the decision to institute half days was originally made? We asked how much planning time teachers currently have and for what they required additional planning time? Parents asked if there was any data on how the time gained from the current half days has been used by teachers? Parents inquired whether the School Board had made comparisons with the three most successful school districts in the country (which have no or very few half days per year)? It is my opinion that many of the responses given were inadequate to actually answer those questions, or in other words, to convince parents that half days are a good idea.

Whether the reason for the half days is that teachers need more planning time or that the Board is seeking to give teachers a de facto raise through shortened hours (as suggested by some parents), half days should be off the table. You do not solve one problem – either insufficient planning time or insufficient pay – by creating a much larger one: insufficient instruction time for our children and a schedule that is going in the opposite direction of excellence in education. If insufficient planning time (or insufficient teacher pay) is the problem, then the School Board must go back to the chalk board and come up with solutions that resolve those problems without compromising the future of our State, which in my view, lies in the education of our children.