Looking back at August-September 2001 brings to mind the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The two weeks prior to what we now just refer to as 9/11 contained some of the best times of my life, and then, of course, the worst of times on that one day and those immediately following.

August 30, 2001 was my fiftieth birthday. A big number that I didn’t feel ready for (it sounded so much older than forty-nine!), but I had the most wonderful multi-day celebration with my dearest family and friends around me because. . .

September 1, 2001 was my son Ben’s bar mitzvah. All of my family had converged on Sacramento for this event, many flying in from the East Coast. Several had arrived early to be here for my birthday as well.

On my birthday all of us adults went to an amazing restaurant in the Napa Valley called The French Laundry, leaving all the young cousins at home supervised by Molly’s nanny. It is exceedingly difficult to get a table at The French Laundry. In fact it is often named in lists of the top ten most difficult restaurant reservations to book in the world.  It only takes reservations two months to the date beforehand, and it is so popular that all the tables are gone in minutes. So on June 30, I was on the phone at exactly 10 a.m. when the phone line opened. I went through a few busy signals and redials before I finally got connected, but luckily there was still a table available for August 30. This turned out to be one of the best meals I have ever eaten in my life!

The next day was the bar mitzvah rehearsal in the morning and Shabbat services in the evening. In between there were trips to the airport to pick up even more relatives and friends, and just hanging out in our backyard swimming pool.

Saturday was the bar mitzvah. Ben chanted flawlessly and gave a rabbinical-quality speech analyzing his Torah portion. Everyone was mesmerized. We had a spectacular party afterwards, which I considered to be my fiftieth birthday party — Ben said that was all right with him, as long as he got all the presents!

On Sunday and Monday people gradually dispersed, flying to other parts of the country. Tuesday, which was the day after Labor Day, was the first day of school in our district, and for Molly, her first day of kindergarten. How momentous! The next week was full of lots of happy developments, since school is always so much fun at the beginning of the year, and I was vicariously enjoying middle school and high school with the older kids, as well as kindergarten. On Saturday we went to a fundraiser for John Garamendi, now a member of Congress, who was running for Insurance Commissioner at the time. Peter Yarrow was there, and I had a chance to talk with him and tell him how profoundly he had affected me with his song “The Great Mandala” in Chicago in 1968. He told me about a new project he was working on, and I was going to get involved, but then that all got lost as a result of what happened next.

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11th, my husband and I were awakened by the telephone shortly before 7 a.m. Pacific time. It was my husband’s twin brother calling from England. “Turn on the television” was all he said. We turned on the television to find footage of the planes hitting the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It was on all the networks, and it seemed like they were showing it over and over again. We were stunned, of course. And frightened. Was this going to be the end of the world? Was it part of some bigger plan that would include attacks in other parts of the country as well? Should we keep our children home from school? Not that they would necessarily be any safer at home, but at least we would all be together if we were going to die.

Ultimately we decided to send them all to school. Even if there were going to be other attacks, we figured they wouldn’t be in Sacramento, California. Possibly San Francisco, but more likely LA, if anywhere on the West Coast.

We told Sabrina and Ben what had happened. They knew something unusual was going on when they woke up and found us watching television, something that we never did. We knew their teachers would be talking about it at school, and we wanted to explain to them what we knew (which wasn’t much) before they went. With Molly, I don’t think we told her anything. How could a 5-year-old possibly comprehend what even the rest of us were having trouble with? She was in afternoon kindergarten, so I drove her to school at lunchtime, and sat with her and the other kids and the teacher while they ate lunch. The teacher told me she was not planning to discuss it with the class at all.

Beyond that, it is just a blur. Checking to make sure my New York relatives were okay. Being thankful that Ben’s bar mitzvah hadn’t been scheduled for two weeks later, when flying would have been almost impossible. Learning more details about the flights, the attackers, the victims. All so incomprehensible.

And then gradually, after a while, starting to feel normal again.

We watched the events of 9/11 with a kind of detached horror, since we didn’t personally know any of the victims. Or did we?
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We came off the Vineyard just before Labor Day, 2001 to a house in renovation chaos and our family in chaos. My in-laws had always spent the parting days of summer with us on the Vineyard, then the beginning of the fall with us in Newton, but Erv passed away the previous May. Gladys still came to the Vineyard and returned to Newton with us, but couldn’t stay with us, as her suite, like the rest of the house, was torn apart. We had no kitchen, the contents were packed away and in storage scattered around various rooms in the house. We set up a hot plate next to the sink, microwave and extra fridge in the finished basement. We ate a lot of take-out off a card table. Every window and door was being replaced, as well as the front den turned into a library, the screened-in porch turned into the den and integrated into the kitchen, which was stripped down to the studs.

Before returning, we replaced the carpet in the lower level, exposing the old tiles and discovered they had asbestos, so had to do proper removal and abatement, which cost a fortune and slowed down the whole project. We even set up a new phone system and for about a week, I tried a new-fangled answering system with a randomly assigned, 10 digit, impossible-to-remember password. This was long before I had an iPhone. I had a Motorola flip phone. I did not know how to store phone numbers in it. I had a little sticker on it with a few key numbers.

Gladys, my dear mother-in-law, stayed in town several extra weeks because her best friend since the age of 15 had donated the money for a new wing to the Rose Art Museum. This would be dedicated in a fancy black-tie affair on the third Saturday of September, and childhood friend Lois wanted her there. Gladys couldn’t stay with us. Our artwork was off the walls and stored in her bedroom and the adjacent sitting room, even while the windows were stripped out and changed, sills caulked and painted. So she stayed with friends, but wasn’t really comfortable. She wanted to get to our house as soon as she could. Despite her requests, I could not speed the progress of the work.

My children were also in chaos. David, in 10th grade, had transferred to a small, intense independent school in Boston’s Back Bay. He took the “T”, Boston’s public transportation system to and from school, with the closest station a mile from our home. Jeffrey, in 6th grade, had just started middle school and for the first time had multiple teachers in a large school environment. Our Asperger’s, ADHD child didn’t deal well with change or the need to make decisions of any sort. No one with his profile does. This environment assaulted his senses constantly. This was the last year he barely functioned in school. For the next several years, he shut down altogether. He also began training seriously for his bar mitzvah, 20 months away. He was taking various forms of therapies, including occupational, with an appointment that Tuesday, which was supposed to help with sensory integration issues. He had a lot on his plate.

Dan worked at Accenture, newly formed as a result of the IPO of Andersen Consulting. He traveled constantly, but also knew that, as a result of the IPO, and his age, he would not remain at Accenture much longer (they pushed VPs past the age of 50 out the door). On the evening of September 10, Dan flew from Logan Airport to Washington, DC for an internal training conference. The meeting was a mile from the Pentagon.

At 9:10am on September 11, my sister-in-law Liz called. “Where’s my brother”, she barked? “He’s in Washington, Liz. Why?” “Turn on the TV”, was all she responded. I turned it on in time to see the second tower fall. I had no context, I didn’t understand what I saw. I was horrified. Dan’s family knew he was flying, didn’t know when or where, just that he flew to NYC a lot and they already knew that one of the planes that flew into the towers that morning came out of Logan (though it hadn’t been flying to NY, it was LA-bound). Two of the four planes that went down that morning came out of Logan. I assured Liz that Dan was OK, hung up and ran out of the house. I had a private Pilates class in a little studio in Newton with no TV or phone. They charged me a fortune whether I showed up or not.

The few people in the studio seemed to know more than I did. They knew that Boston was being evacuated as there were fears that the Hancock Tower (Boston’s tallest building) was a target and there was a traffic jam coming out of town. I worried about David, a few blocks from the Hancock. I had an appointment at our temple to talk, briefly, about Jeffrey, then ran home to shower. The phone rang. It was David’s school advisor. They closed the school, but wanted me to drive into Boston to pick him up. They didn’t want any of the kids underground on the subway. Boston was in a panic.

I looked at my watch. I had just enough time to drive in, get him, drive back to Newton, pick up Jeffrey and a sick neighbor’s kids at the same school and get my younger child to occupational therapy. The phone rang. I ran to grab it, but missed the call and didn’t have time to look up that crazy 10 digit password to retrieve the message. It would have to wait. My kids were stunned and anxious. I had no answers for them, except to assure them that their father was safe. He had called and reassured me.

When I finally got Jeffrey to occupational therapy at about 3pm, I called into my voice mail. Poor Gladys had called me several times. She was frantic. I looked up her friend’s number and called. She was so crazed, she had called Dan’s office. His admin was able to tell her that he was safe. I apologized for not calling her back earlier, but told her I just did not have the time, I had to take care of my kids. She came over for dinner so we could all be together.

We gathered in front of the TV later in the day, watching the replays in shock, trying to make sense of the whole day. Dan was a mile from the Pentagon when it happened. His training session dissolved. He wandered around DC, which he said was like a ghost town. He found a place to give blood. They said they didn’t need any. There were no survivors in need of blood.

He and several friends decided they didn’t need to stay for the rest of the training meeting. What was the point? Four of them, from different cities, rented a car and drove north, dropping people off as they went. Smart move. Flights were grounded for days and rental cars were soon gone. Dan was the last one driving. He dropped the car at Logan on Thursday, Sept 13 and picked up his own car, arriving home late at night. The landscape had become surreal.

I picked up red, white and blue folded ribbons to wear on our lapels in remembrance and solidarity. On Friday night, my mother-in-law and I went to temple and prayed; for the lost and those who survived. We knew the United States would never be the same. How profoundly we’d changed, we could not yet know.

Duck and cover seemed the height of folly, and I'd never felt immortal.
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I graduated from Brandeis in 1974 with a degree in Theatre Arts and a Massachusetts Secondary Teaching Certificate. I also got married a month after graduating. Dan, my new husband, worked at a small software company in Waltham, MA called SofTech, but would start graduate school in the fall, though he continued to work part time. I needed a job. I applied to all the suburban schools near where we would live before I graduated, but heard nothing back from any.

When we returned from our nuptials in Detroit, driving through Canada for our honeymoon, I called all the schools where I had applied to teach to let them know of my name and address change. Dan’s family always had to spell his difficult last name and did it in this way: “P as in Peter, F as in Frank, A, U”. I knew I was in trouble when one administrator said, “You say your name is “Peter, Frank, Owwww!”. OY! I heard from none of the schools. I didn’t apply to Boston. A judge had just desegregated the schools and the KKK was marching on the steps of the State House. Little 5′ tall Betsy was not getting near that situation.

I read the want-ads in the paper and answered random ones, but nothing panned out. As August rolled around, I became desperate. We attended a party with lots of Dan’s fellow workers one Saturday night, including his office-mate Lelah and her husband Mike, who also worked at SofTech. I cornered Lelah, with whom I had been friendly since Dan went to work there a year earlier. “If you want to do him a favor, hire me!” She mulled this over, and told me to come in the following Tuesday (she worked part-time) and interview. She thought I might be right for the position of Program Librarian and she was hiring.

I was nervous. I knew nothing about computers, but I wore something I considered suitable for the office (which was ten minutes from our apartment) and showed up for the interview. Lelah explained the job and tested my typing skills, which were decent. She passed me over to others in the office. I had no idea what they were talking about. I came home crying. I didn’t think I was at all right for the job. Lelah called later. She apologized. The other people didn’t understand what she wanted me to do and she told me I was hired! I would make $7,000/year. Dan made that much working part-time. Still, between the two of us, we could get by.

At the same time, an offer came through from the theatre at Brandeis to be the administrator to the manager. I wouldn’t be acting, but I’d be around the theatre. It paid the same amount, but was only a nine month/year job with no room for growth. And the more I thought about it, I realized that being close to the theatre, but not in the productions, would probably drive me crazy.

I took the software job, not understanding anything about what I was supposed to do, beyond keypunching the programmers’ code. Lelah told me I was “over-educated and under-qualified” for the job, but she knew I was smart, willing, and would learn quickly. I cut off my nails and went to work the next Monday. Lelah took me out to a welcome lunch and the company of about 60 employees was a welcoming place, though I never entirely understood what they did. Much of it was Department of Defense contract work, so I got a security clearance – finger prints on file with the Waltham police.

Soon I was running the small data center, had a small staff of people who also were doing data input and I got so familiar with the code that I would recognize if a programmer had left off a semi-colon at the end of a phrase. I am very organized. But I was bored out of my gourd. In the computer room, which was very noisy, I’d sing Gilbert and Sullivan at the top of my lungs while keypunching with the door closed. I didn’t realize how loud I was until the company president poked his head in one day to tell me that I had a good voice!

I became friendly with the guy in the office next to me, the successful salesman. I watched and listened to what he did. I had a feeling I’d be good at that too, but was told a woman couldn’t sell to the military…women were either secretaries or mistresses. I took great delight in proving him wrong when, a few years later, I sold a contract to a full colonel in the Air Force at the Pentagon. But this was 1977.

These smart folks, many from MIT, started talking about software engineering and evidently a program librarian was an important part of that. There was a group working on a course on the subject with a company called Advanced Systems, Inc. out of Chicago. They developed and sold or rented video training. A course developer was coming to the office to work on the material  and would interview me. After years of doing this work I was ready to move on. I knew I would be an excellent sales person. I had the right personality, follow-through and ability to ask the tough questions. I was ready.

When the ASI person showed up that February day in 1978 he set up his tape recorder and asked me a series of questions about my job. When he asked me what was the career path for a program librarian, I turned off his recorder and handed him my resume. I was in Chicago in my first sales position two months later.

I worked in Chicago for 16 months, came back to Boston over Labor Day weekend, 1979 as a top sales professional. I am still friendly with Lelah, who took a risk on an untested girl and gave me my first job.

How is the Ku Klux Klan still a thing? In old movies we see those white-sheeted ridiculous-looking figures riding on horseback through the countryside, carrying fiery torches, setting the shacks of poor black people ablaze and leaving burning crosses to light up the night. But this is in the past, right? Wa-a-a-ay in the past! How can it be that they are still around and still preaching hate? How is it that former Grand Wizard David Duke is still making headlines … praising our pathetic excuse for a President? I just can’t believe that in the second decade of the 21st Century the KKK can still be something that people want to join.

And Nazis . . . how is it possible that they are still a thing? I remember learning about Hitler as a child, and reading The Diary of Anne Frank. We also learned to say “Never Again” and were promised that our society would make sure that something like that wouldn’t happen again. Not to us. And certainly not in this country! But look at what is happening now, in Charlottesville and elsewhere. It is devastating, and very frightening, to discover that Nazis are still very much a thing.

How do we get off this Highway to Hell so that we can all get along? I certainly don’t claim to have the answer, but the first step is to get rid of this evil presence in the White House and all of his hateful cronies.

It’s not just the outcome I’m unhappy with. It's also undemocratic.
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...with isolation and aloneness as the only relief.
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The Democratic Party has won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, but lost the office of the President due to the Electoral College. The Electoral College has GOT to go!

The framers of the Constitution had a population made up heavily of farmers, many of whom were illiterate and lived in remote places. News traveled slowly. Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison thought it would be wise if educated people represented those who cast their votes and ultimately decided who should be installed in office. This was before there were even political tickets. Whoever came in second became Vice President. There have been amendments to the Constitution, allowing for political tickets and giving the District of Columbia three votes, but the notion of a “winner takes all” vote in nearly all the states, when a candidate wins by a hair’s breath, in this era of Internet and easy access to communication, makes no sense. Time to go!