9-11 in the Pfau Household

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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.

 

Honest Work

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Honest Work

           Working as a carpenter was the most honest work I have ever done.

In the beginning, I saved for the family that hadn’t yet materialized. Later, I left the house treading softly with babies snuffling familiar scents. My wife always got up with me, made me breakfast, handed me a lunch.

Those early, dark summer mornings were a sensual prelude to the next 16 hours’ stimulus. The earth rolled us toward the position of sunrise. But, I always found a moment, in the predawn, with a pale smirk on the horizon allowing a pause—not to shrink back from the open-mouthed laughter of the sun’s oppressive heat, but to appreciate silence in all its forms.

I slammed the door on my truck, started the motor and the spell was broken—as if thousands of geese had opened their throats and wings at once, as if all the soft, green leaves in a cottonwood suddenly dried and clattered against each other, as if ants had just started in on a carcass.

From my mountain pass at 2200 feet to the bare desert at sea level, I descended through zones of habitat. Condominiums awaited assembly. Concrete slabs, still in the process of drying, were a form of order in rectangles — arranged among the dunes. Sections of trees lay nearby in bundles. Kegs of iron, having been once melted and stamped into rough pins, gave me the power of a seamstress. I would stitch the lumber into right angles, and ordered dimensions. I would hem the seams that would define the patterns and ultimately provide decoration for the bodies within.

Would a flock of geese flying over marvel to each other at the cacophony of the woodworking below? How would we appear from above; slapping lumber, wheeling our hammered arms against the nailheads, cursing testaments to our power, orchestrating the pitches of electric saws? Might we seem like a movie about ants — only on rewind — as we assembled a carcass?

Salt dried on our bodies in wavy ripples. Bandanas or straw hats grew crusty and stiff. Socks within heavy boots collected trickling sweat until they were soggy. Our skin labored to regulate body temperature, while deep within our cores I imagine Scotty shouting to Captain Kirk that Warp Five was impossible, that the reactors were melting down. But Captain Kirk knew his ship — he knew that another half an hour at 105 degrees was not an emergency. This was merely a test of reactors–and manhood.

I called it a ‘final surge’. I took the time to make sure that the angles were right. I stitched together the final hem. And then I took care of my tools; accounted for them, and put them away.

Just as I reached for the door of my little yellow truck, I paused and looked over my days’ work — a physical testament to my labor, the skeletal structure of a place that someone would call ‘home’.

Now, years later, I still cash in my emotional reward. Driving by, I’ll say, “I built that.”

Over-Educated, Under-Qualified

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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.

Highway to Hell

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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.

Article II, Section 1

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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!

 

I Will Survive

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Stanford Sierra Camp, June 2008

On March 10, 2008, I had my annual mammogram. Never a pleasant experience, but tolerable, and I dutifully went every year without giving it much thought. That year was different. A few days afterwards the imaging center called me and said they wanted to do another mammogram of my right breast, so on March 20 I went back and did it again. Then they said, hmmm, we’re not sure what we’re seeing, so we want to do a core biopsy. I had this done on March 27.

The next thing that happened was that I got a call from my primary-care physician’s office, saying she wanted me to come in for an appointment with her, and I shouldn’t come alone. I couldn’t get them to tell me anything more, but I knew they wouldn’t say “don’t come alone” if they were going to give me good news. When I showed up for the appointment, and the receptionist asked what I was being seen for, I said “I don’t know, you tell me, this wasn’t my idea — I was summoned by Dr. Garcia.” I was angry that I had to come to the office, and even angrier at the questioning by the receptionist. Couldn’t they have put a note in the file so she wouldn’t ask me that?

The doctor said the biopsy was malignant, and she would refer me to an oncologist. She didn’t know the answers to any of the questions my husband and I asked. So basically, the visit was worthless and a complete waste of time. She could have told me this over the phone, and saved me the trip and the $15 co-pay. Apparently they are not supposed to give bad news over the phone, for fear the recipient will do something rash.

In the several days between talking to the PCP and meeting with the oncologist, my brain was spinning. I had cancer. Growing up, cancer had been considered a death sentence. People didn’t even like to say the word, whispering it or referring to it as “the C-word.” I was certain that I was going to die. I knew I didn’t want to have chemotherapy, I had seen too many friends have horrible experiences with it, and what was the point, I was going to die anyway. I made my peace with dying. My kids would be okay, that was the most important consideration. Sabrina was in graduate school in England, Ben was at Harvard, and Molly, although only in sixth grade, would be fine with her father. I could relax and just accept my death.

However, the lengthy discussion with the oncologist, when that finally happened, gave me a different perspective. What I had was called DCIS, Ductal Carcinoma In Situ, which was the very earliest stage of breast cancer, and could be resolved with outpatient surgery and a course of radiation. No chemotherapy required, and all quite simple. Sure wish I had gotten this news in the first place! This was so much better than I expected that it never occurred to me to research DCIS or question whether I even needed surgery.

On April 22, just six weeks after my original mammogram, I went to UC Davis Medical Center for the procedure. On my calendar I see that I had to be there at 8:00 a.m., but for some reason the operation didn’t happen until the afternoon. I had a book with me, but after a while I got bored reading (or maybe I finished the book). I wandered around in my hospital gown until I found an unattended computer. As luck would have it, no password was required. While checking my email, I discovered a note from a friend inviting me to join facebook. So I did. He then started a Scrabble game on facebook with me, it was in beta testing at the time. Amusing that now, more than nine years later, that is my strongest memory of that day.

The next week I had a follow-up appointment with the surgeon. He informed me that the margins were not clear and he wanted to operate again. Since I had totally bought into the program, of course I said yes. The second surgery occurred on May 2, and for that one they wanted me there at 5:45 a.m.! I don’t know why, but that’s what it says on my calendar, and I guess I must have actually been there at that time, even though I am NOT an early-morning person. That surgery occurred more promptly, so I didn’t have time to wander around and get into any mischief.

I started radiation on May 21. It turned out the radiation oncologist was a friend of mine, a 1983 graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe, and an interviewer for the local Harvard Schools & Scholarships Committee, of which I am the chair. Seeing her familiar face was very reassuring. I had to go to radiation five days a week for six weeks, which was a little bit of a nuisance, but my time slot was 10:15 a.m, so I could easily take Molly to school and come back home before going there. My doctor friend was also willing to make the radiation schedule flexible for me, which another doctor might not have done. In mid-June we had a week planned at Stanford Sierra Camp, a wonderful family camp at Fallen Leaf Lake – that’s where the featured image was taken. At the end of June I was going with Molly’s Girl Scout troop on a four-day trip to Disneyland paid for by selling Girl Scout cookies. I wasn’t willing to miss either of these, but fortunately we were able to work the radiation schedule around them. By mid-July I was finished. I went to a couple of follow-up appointments, but then I stopped because they didn’t seem useful. I was ready to be done with the whole thing.

I didn’t tell anyone except my husband and kids about any of this until after it was all over. I didn’t want my mother to worry, and I certainly didn’t want anyone making a big fuss about it. (When I told Molly, early in the process, she only had two questions: would I still be able to take her to school, and would my hair fall out. Since the answers were “yes” and “no” respectively, she was happy.) Even now, I suspect that most people who know me have no idea that I had breast cancer. At least until they read this story.

Recently I have read some articles about DCIS, suggesting that it isn’t cancer at all, and there is no need to do anything about it. This made me upset that I had so gullibly gone along with what the doctors said. I guess growing up as a doctor’s daughter had given me the belief that doctors always knew best. Now I would be a little more skeptical. But it wasn’t a terrible experience overall, and maybe it stopped me from developing actual cancer, so there is not much point in being upset. In the words of Nietzsche – and the song by Kelly Clarkson – what does not kill us makes us stronger.

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