It was a Tuesday.
It was the Tuesday of the sixth week of my new life.
It started like every other Tuesday had and would over the two years that I'd spend living there. In that apartment, my first apartment.
Tuesday morning, early September. I woke up before my alarm went off bathed in the early autumn light of rural Missouri.
It was a good day.
I got up, showered, got dressed and pulled down one of my white porcelain cereal bowls out of the cupboard. Those bowls I'd stolen from my parents some six years earlier, in the midst of the life that came before the one I was now living. The bowls my son and I eat out of every morning, now, two or three lives later.
When you master regeneration, they all begin to blend together, don't they?
I grabbed a bowl and sat down at my desk, pouring Wheaties into it and firing up my world. Yoda the mac, Boba Fett the PC, loaded the CD changer with new music, hit play and sat down to a message from Tom. An old friend from the life before this.
Elusive1: Holy Shit Man. Turn on the fucking TV.
Nevarro: What?
Elusive1: CN FuckingN. Turn it the fuck on. You're not going to believe this.
And like that my new life was over. Not in the shower of sparks and celebration that normally accompany these sorts of things. But in dark and smoke and…is that another plane?
I sat there, stunned, in conversation with a dozen people at once. From all over the country, except the places that mattered, we talked. We wondered, we all begged for information about friends from the old country that could conceivably be involved. In retrospect, it seems like such a shallow, selfish gesture in the face of tragedy. But the nation is the smallest unit of human measure and in moments of transformation all we are capable of doing is wondering where our people are and how they are doing.
Nation. A funny word that makes more sense now that it did then. Nations are not about governments or elected officials and barely about ideologies. They're about your people. Who are my people, where are my people how do I take care of my people.
Then I looked at the clock. Shit. Work. I had to be at work at ten. It was almost ten now. Work was two floors down from that apartment, still warming up in the glow of autumn sun. The kids. The kids were all around me. Next door, above, below. Everywhere. The kids. Shit, were the kids? Did the kids? Fuck. Kids.
I bolted from my chair.
I didn't close my chat windows, I didn't say goodbye to anyone. I ran out the door, stopping for a split second to grab my keys and put on shoes.
I ran.
Down the hallway, tumbling down the stairs, didn't have time to wait for the elevator. Two, three, four, six steps at a time. Though I know it's incredibly unlikely I want to say I jumped the entire last set of stairs in my haste to get down to the lounge. Down to the kids.
They'd begun to assemble. The kids. 16, 17 and I'm sure 18. They stood in front of a 72" TV and tried to make sense of images that barely made sense to me. At 22.
I don't know how long I'd been there when Deb came up to me.
"Baby E." That was her name for me. My boss, my friend, my mentor. She'd known me since I was one of her kids, younger than the kids she'd hired me to work with. "Baby E, we need to."
"I know."
So we had our staff meeting. Meeting six for the year. And unlike any before or since, it didn't go it's scheduled two hours. It went about two minutes.
The rest of the day is a blur. I sat with the kids since I didn't have to teach a class that day and they didn't have classes to go to. I sat there and taught them about the new world order. Who is this bin Laden guy? Why does he hate us? How did we get here? Where do we go now?
I fielded calls from parents. Yes, your child is alright. Yes, they're here. No, you don't have to talk to them. Yes, things are going to be OK.
Parents, hours away from their children at this moment. Becoming a father in the ten years since I understand the mothers and fathers I spoke to that day. They were fighting two competing impulses; the urge to hold your child and never let go in the face of tragedy and the desire to hide from their children, lest they have to explain events that defied explanation.
In the end, it fell to me.
At some point in the afternoon we had to track down "The Prophet." One of the kids had become convinced this was the End of Days and he began to print up verses from the Book of Revelations to post around the dorm. I tracked him down and handed him off to Brother Robert to deal with. I was the historian, the political scientist on staff. Brother Robert was (and still is) the resident Biblical Scholar. The Prophet was in good hands.
But the damage had been done. The kids were already scared.
At 4:30 Deb reminded me that it was my turn to take the kids to WalMart.
It was rural Missouri. A WalMart town in every sense of the world. And on Tuesdays, we drove the kids to WalMart to get whatever they "needed" for the week."
"We need things to feel as normal as they can."
She was right. In the face of regeneration we must carry on as if nothing were changing. As if going through the paces of our old lives would give us direction on how to live our new life.
So I got the van.
I pulled up to the loading dock and loaded 16 frightened teenagers into the van and drove them to WalMart. We were seven hours removed from when I'd tumbled down the stairs and I hadn't taken a moment to myself. I'd been surrounded by the kids all day, answering questions, soothing nerves and I was about ready to pop.
The conversation in the van was about financial collapse, about The Prophet's warnings and about how expensive gas had become. As we drove around town we saw two and three dollar increases from what we were paying the night before. In the decade that's elapsed the prices we saw as the end of the world as we knew it have become standard.
But it'd started to wear on me. There was so much fear, so much unknown, so much misinformation making things worse in that van that I had to say something.
I yelled.
What I yelled at the kids doesn't matter. It was something about not talking if you didn't understand what was going on. Something about not being stupid kids anymore. Something about growing up. I don't know. But I do know that we drove the rest of the way in silence.
The rest of the night went on as they day before it had. All of us glued to the TV wondering what would come next.
At ten we put the kids to bed and met one last time.
After that meeting Deb asked me if I was going to come back to work tomorrow.
Yes.
"Congratulations, you're really a teacher now."
I slumped against the elevator, twelve hours after I'd come down. I waited there and felt the cold metal doors suck the heat out of my face. There was the familiar ding and the doors opened and Newton pulled me in. The button hit itself and I wandered down the hall, checking in on everyone as I went. Everyone was good. Everyone was calm. Everyone was different. Everyone had changed.
I got to my door, and pushed it open. I grabbed a Dr. Pepper out of the fridge and sat down at my work station. Yoda and Boba Fett glowed to life and there were all the messages sent to me throughout the day. The windows I'd left opened and ones that'd just sprung to life. Everyone letting me know that people were OK. Everyone letting me know where they'd woken up after the regeneration. Everyone telling me about the state of our nation.
I couldn't reply. My nation had grown that day. The kids were now my people. And I had to write down what'd happened so that I could remember who they were before their new lives had begun. So I could remember who they were before we became family.
And I cried.
As I look back at what I wrote that day I'm struck by the hope that existed in those hours. The unity and beauty of what could be in the next decade if only we held fast to each other.
Looking back, I know how young I was. How different we were. And how proud I am of those kids.
Regardless of what we lost and gained in the decade since, life has moved on. My nation, my people have answered their calls. My kids have grown up to answer their own calls.
It is a Sunday.
It is the one hundred and thirty fourth Sunday of my new life.
It started like many other Sundays in this life. The Bears are playing on the TV and my wife and son are dueling with light sabers.
Sunday morning, early September. I woke up to the sound of my son telling me it was morning, both of us bathed in the early autumn light of rural New Mexico.
It is a good day.
