Seuss

Last night, when I wrote that insanely long entry about having other people read my stuff, it was really just a diversion from the loads of Oh Holy Crap! going on everywhere except right in that seat in front of that screen.

It started out so normally. I had a PTO board meeting yesterday morning at the butt-crack of dawn, but at least with the time change it was daylight when I was walking around yanking on random doors of the school trying to find one that was unlocked at that hour. During the meeting I got a phone call – my phone on silent, of course – which I let roll to voicemail. It was from an odd, but local, number, though, so while everyone was discussing mulch for beautification day, I quickly listened to the first few seconds to make sure it was nothing urgent, like a neighbor threatening to shoot one of my jackass barking dogs who believes leaves blowing around might as well be an army of robbers trying to get in the house. Fortunately, it was far more mundane; it was an appraiser wanting to set up a time to come walk through our house for an appraisal on a re-fi.

Yes, before you say it, I know, I know, I know. We should have done this months ago when rates were in the tank, but the timing for us wasn’t right then so we’re doing it now and still saving ourselves money, so shut it. Anyway. Re-fi.

I called the appraiser back when I get in the car, mad-dashing toward Chick-Fil-A because I cannot physically get up early enough to shower, brush my teeth, AND eat before PTO board meetings for some reason, so my stomach is inevitably louder than Cowboy’s Stadium with the roof closed by the time we wrap up. So I call the guy up and he tells me he needs to come do a walk-through for the appraisal.

Now, I am the first person to admit I’ve been a total slacker for the past few weeks when it comes to my house. Clean laundry resides on the dining room table, computers are strewn everywhere in different states of “getting them ready to get rid of”-ness, and my “therapy room” (also my office where I’ve been writing like a fiend) is the most clutter, least relaxing room in the house unless you’re laying on the floor staring only at the ceiling. And let’s not even mention Earl’s bedroom and playroom where there are frequently 2-6 kids up there slinging stuff around like nobody’s business.

So I’m talking to the guy, going over what maintenance we’ve done, what improvements we’ve made, and I’m thinking, “Eh, I can just go through and tidy things up a bit. It’s at least a good excuse to sit down and sort through Earl’s Hoarders-worthy book collection. But then he says the dreaded words: “They require me to take pictures now, so….”

Wait. WHAT?? You not only need to walk through my house, but you have to take PICTURES? OF MY HOUSE???

That small part of my Nana that still resides in my DNA had a total and complete stroke. Because while my house may have been walkable and measurable, it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, camera ready.

I did some deep breathing. Attempted to calm myself. “Okay, that sounds great!” I lied. “When can we set it up?”

“Well, I’m leaving town tomorrow afternoon and won’t be back until Monday.”

Fast math buzzing through my head. We’re trying to push this re-fi through before our next payments are due and next Monday puts us two days before Thanksgiving holidays, and crap crap crap crap shit, then it’s December and our next payments are due. Not the end of the world, but we really want to get this thing done, like, NOW.

“But I can come by in the morning, if that works for you. Say, around 9?”

I looked at the clock. 23 hours. I had 23 hours to pull my house together. And my husband’s out of town, so no help there. Uhhhhh….

I called my mother, panicked. Well, actually, first I called a painter, just so when the appraiser is taking pictures of my beat up walls with nail pops all over the place and that small spot of water damage from a freak leak around an upstairs dormer window, I can honestly say I’m having someone to come in an give me an estimate later this week.

My mother, y’all, is the bomb. She was at my house in a flash, helping me sort through Earl’s books.

Is it at this point where I tell you that all of this “Hurry, we have to find somewhere to put it so just put it all away I don’t care where” panic mode of mine actually manifested as “Dangit, if I am going to be forced to do this, I am going to do it RIGHT?” Because the first two hours of cleaning out my daughter’s personal library that happens to have a bed in it involved me sitting on the floor with my laptop opened to ARBookFind.com, entering each book, and passing the book to my mother who, if it’s a 3.5 or below (if you have a kid who does AR, you know what I’m talking about), sorted it into either a sentimental pile or a donate pile. If it was a 3.5 or above, she wrote the grade level and the test point value on the inside cover and replaced it on the shelf.

I don’t clean often, but when I do, I anally clean.

Wait.

Nevermind.

You know what I mean.

So we sort through all the books, finding all kind of gems along the way. Like, why does my child have THREE Trophies reading textbooks PLUS a Teacher’s Guide? It’s like she’s related to me or something! (I adored old textbooks. It was part of my nerd identity.)

We picked Earl up from school, and I immediately incentivized. “Hey, Earl. If you’ll go upstairs to your playroom and put all of your little Playmobil pieces into the big blue drawstring thing, I’ll give you FIVE dollars.” Her eyes went wide. I saw possibility. “AND if you pick up the REST of your playroom where I don’t have to go up there and clean over you? And if you can get it all done in the 30 minutes before we have to leave for horseback, I’ll give you TEN dollars.”

That child hardly said a word before she was upstairs and I was pulling up the security camera to see what all the banging was as she slung things from one end of the room to the other to get them nearer where they ultimately belonged. Kid flat out earned that ten dollars (although I could have spent another 20 minutes up there, but she was gangbusters until I told her we had to leave).

Oh yes. In the middle of all of this, it was horseback day, which meant there went all of that lovely, invaluable time between 3:30 and 5:45. And, OH WAIT! It was also Chick-Fil-A Spirit Night for the school and I had promised to work 6:30 to 8! By the time we’d left for horseback, I’d managed to eliminate around 150 books (really, I am not even kidding) from Earl’s bedroom, get that disaster area somewhat under control, and she had tidied up the playroom. And now I had 150 books and four stacks of other things that were deemed fit to move on to clutter someone else’s home in my kitchen.

On the way home from horseback, a migraine aura floating around in my field of vision from, I dunno, maybe the sudden onslaught of panic at the mere idea of someone photographing my house, I had a thought that might help allay some of my fear. I called my brother, who is a loan officer with the very bank who is handling my re-fi. “Hey, bro! I have this guy coming to my house tomorrow for an appraisal and he says he has to take pictures. Does my house actually have to be clean for this?”

At that point, that small part of Nana still residing in my DNA suddenly recovered from her stroke and smacked me upside the head for asking such an asinine question because, regardless of the answer, “Yes, the house must be clean! Did we not raise you better than this?” Yeeeaaaaah, apparently not all of that stuck like it should have, Nana.

My brother actually laughed. “Seuss, he’s just there to look at the structure and the fixtures, upgrades and stuff. No, it doesn’t have to be clean.” “Which means as long as he can tell there aren’t holes in the wall that could be home to a small litter of kittens, then it’s not going to hurt the value on my appraisal?” “Right. Cats in the wall are never good.”

I took a deep breath. Awesome. So there’s some room for error. I can relax, right? Woo hoo! Well, when I got home from my duties at Chick-Fil-A, I figured, since I can relax, what the heck, let me sit down and write a blog entry for an hour! Then I can catch up on Dr. Phil and The Biggest Loser and catch an episode of Hoarders while ignoring the three laundry baskets worth of laundry still spread out on my dining room table!

At 6:45, my newfangled alarm clock for the hair of hearing that actually shakes my mattress to wake me up effectively woke me up.

Note: I am not hard of hearing. I am an intense REM sleeper who lately won’t wake up by noise alone – I require a physical poke or jab or 8yo knee-dropping into my bladder. Hence, new alarm clock with shaker feature.

I shot rolled out of bed, showered, finished off the last few things that needed to be done upstairs, dressed, and walked downstairs to the disaster that had been created by cleaning out upstairs. My dining room table still rivaled JCPenney, the laundry room was overflowing with dirty clothes (how can three people generate this many dirty clothes????), my living room looked like the Apple Store had gotten drunk and vomited all over it, and my kitchen looked like Barnes and Noble’s children’s aisle after a horde of insane preschoolers ate a pack of pixie sticks each and just went at it.

Overwhelmed yet again, my inner Nana clucking away in my head, what did I do? Yes. Yes, I called my mother. Again.

An hour in, as I was stacking the laundry from the dining room table into baskets, I called out to my mother, who was putting Earl’s books for storage into a box. “Okay, Mom. Reassure me. I need to hear it. Tell me the cleanliness of my house is not going to effect the valuation on the appraisal.”

There was a pause.

“Humor me, mother!”

She sighed, then in a tone full of utter confidence said, “You and your brother seem convinced that the cleanliness of your house is not going to effect the valuation on the appraisal.”

Here, let me introduce you to my mother, the only person I know who can, with full confidence, deliver qualified reassurance while simultaneously making it clear that she holds the absolute opposite of reassurance. If there was any question, yes, she’s still related to that small piece of my Nana that still resides in my DNA, too.

In a completely anti-climactic end to a far-too-long tale, the house was passable, if nowhere near white glove clean, by the time the appraiser showed up. We walked through the house, talking about updates and maintenance, and I confidently pointed out the little things that I know can make a difference on a valuation. We talked we laughed, I gestured wildly as I spoke because I cannot talk without moving my hands, and he left. Easy as pie.

Is it too much to hope that the small pile of books still tucked under the bar in the kitchen was enough to distract him from the fact that, in my haste to wrap everything up this morning, I forgot to put on a bra?

Back when I was still in college, the creative writing juices still flowing steadily, Stephen King wrote a little book titled On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I pored over his wisdom and candor for days upon days, sitting in the lighting booth during the college theatre’s production of “Cinderella.” It wasn’t that the book was all that long or that difficult to read, I was just that slow of a reader. And, you know, supposed to be paying attention to cues for lighting, but I digress…

On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird were my constant companions at that point in my life as I spent hours upon hours upon hours writing… [hold for a moment while I cringe and go hide under my bed before you read this next line] …fanfiction. “Days of Our Lives” fanfiction. [Don’t judge. It wasn’t complete drivel. Only mostly drivel.]

But at that point in my life, I didn’t feel like I had really lived enough to come up with characters on my own, although I certainly had in previous years. No, there was safety in taking characters that were already knowns and working simply on plot and dialogue. And it was a challenge, attempting to keep them in character, especially when said characters were based on a soap that did a pretty rancid job of keeping it’s own characters in character, but that’s a whole different ball of wax. All of that aside, though, I was writing. I was working at it. A lot. I think the last chapter I published on my website was Chapter 78, and I’m pretty sure I have outlines for about 10 more I never got around to writing. So, yeah. I wrote a lot.

I had friends who helped, contributed entire scenes, held my hand and even sometimes wrote for me when I got nervous, but I had stuff going out there, being seen, being read. And I did have an audience. A pretty decent one at that. I got feedback, good and bad. I had never liked people reading what I wrote, but publishing a serial, where people came to expect the next chapter kind of forced me out of my comfort zone somewhat.

Then, life happened. College was over, Real Life kicked in, and writing soap opera fanfic was just so…uncool. So most of my focus switched to blogging where I have dabbled off and on with writing asinine pieces like the one you’re reading now, using a lot of words to not really say anything at all, because I’m really good at stretching out a word count. Ask any of my former college professors.

Promising myself I wouldn’t return to fanfic, especially in the soap genre, forced my hand. It meant not only did I have to come up with plot and dialogue and all new settings and locations, but I had to come up with characters. And that was really what shut me down. The last thing of any substance that I wrote not for my blog or for school was a very brief foray into (not nearly as cringe-worthy as a soap opera) X-Files fanfic. It was a one shot whose archival date (because, like The Truth, it’s still out there) is listed as Tax Day of 2001.

Twelve years is a long time to not write, especially for someone who had been writing since I was six.

A few weeks ago, though, something, which is another story entirely in and of itself, happened. Suddenly – and I mean overnight suddenly – the juices started flowing. See, in 12 years, I had had kernels of ideas pop up. A scene here, a beginning there, an ending somewhere else, but nothing cohesive. Nothing with meat. But a few weeks ago, I sat down on a Friday night in a hotel room with TechPapa snoring away beside me and outlined an entire screenplay out of the blue. It was one of the most intense, focused things I have done in almost a decade. I was there, I was in it. It wasn’t just little snapshots here and there, it was tone and emotion and visuals and faces and histories.

Ever since, I’ve been working on it. People, I went from not writing in TWELVE. YEARS. to writing EIGHTY ONE PAGES in two weeks. Are they stellar? Hell no. Are they passable? Eh. Are they the bones of something that could actually turn into something? I want to believe.

But here’s the thing. Back in my fanfic writing days (will I ever stop cringing when I write that?), I threw things out there willy nilly for people to read, especially my small group of friends who some chapters did more of the writing than I did (and I still have the IRC logs to prove it!). I begged them to read, to quell my pleas for approval and HELP MEEEE and WRITE THIIIIIIS and I can’t DOOO IIIIIITTTT.

Now, I’ve…well, I’ve outgrown it. I’m not being very true to my own writing when I do that. I let it become someone else’s work and then it’s, well, are they reading this because of MY stuff or because of HER stuff she contributed? And that’s just…not right. Maybe even codependent. I don’t even know. It was twisted, but somehow therapeutic at the time, and it made for some awesome conversation when I threw out in chat one night, “I want to send Marlena into a bar full of football players and have her get smashed while John gets all jealous.” (I still have that chapter saved out individually. It was mostly written by someone else, but it. was. epic.)

Writing this thing, however, has been an entirely different beast. These are characters I never met until I sat in that hotel room the end of October and sketched out the idea. Some of the characters I still don’t know – they’re still morphing. One of my favorite things that’s happened so far was this one scene where an incidental character who, in my head when I started writing, was a ponytailed 20-something went and, in a flash, morphed into a 40-something matronly black lady. A character I thought was a good egg for weeks suddenly turned into a jerk. And there are other examples of how these characters are coming to me, telling me who they are along the way, sharing bits and bobs of their story here and there making me go back and rewrite entire scenes because suddenly they’re in my ear going, “You know, I so totally would NOT say that.”

But here’s the thing. With this piece, I’ve realized that sometimes what you need is another set of eyes just to say, “Yeah, that’s realistic,” or “What ARE you smoking?” Someone to point out, “This character intrigues me. I want to know more about her.” Or even, “Dude, just cut the extra kid. That kid is just in the way.” What I’m writing has a key character who is a 14-year-old holy terror. I have a precocious but incredibly well-intentioned 8-year-old. Some things are just simply out of my realm of experience, and I know I need someone else to look at it and say, “You know, my kid never did that, but I knew a kid….”

Two weeks ago, I recruited a dear, sweet friend of mine to read for me because I knew somehow that she would identify, even just a little, with the main character. The first draft I sent her was, I think, 10 pages. Then I wrote more the next day and sent her that version before she’d even had a chance to read the first. She gave some great feedback, didn’t tell me flat out it sucked donkey balls, and I pressed onward. Over the weekend, the characters in my head went a little bonkers, and I think I about went too far when I was emailing a draft and almost immediately texting her, “Wait, no! Don’t read that one! It’s changed!” followed twenty minutes later by a whole new version that was completely different in three scenes and nine pages longer. I’m pretty sure after that she’s just ignoring my emails.

A few days ago, I got bold and sent a copy to another friend. Of course, I have to realize, the version she got (which I also sent to the first friend who promptly ignored my email, because, really, I went that bonkers) was, I believe 71 pages. First draft. And so rough in places it still gives me splinters. I am determined not to do to the second friend what I did to the first, so I’m trying to bite my tongue and hold my fingers and not corner her on Facebook and bombard her with about 50 lines of “Didjareadit didjareadit didjareadit?”

I also sent a copy of that version to a third friend of mine, really, just for the hell of it and because I have no doubt in my mind that she’s the one who will say, “Really? If you think this is something, you’re insane.” And because a character is partially based on her, although she doesn’t know that unless she reads this (testing…1…2…3…).

With all of this sharing, though, all of this self-exposure, for lack of a better term, my stomach is staying in knots. I need the feedback. I need a gauge of plausibility. I need to know if it is utter and complete dreck or if there is any possibility. But the exposure is petrifying. It’s been well over 20 years since anyone read anything I wrote with original characters, and I was in high school and I printed it out on an Apple ImageWriter dot matrix printer that was so loud it would wake the dead, or at least, on several occasions, my sleeping parents. Back then, I’d flounce around at the pool in a swimsuit all day long like it was nobody’s business. These days, I won’t leave the house in shorts.

The point being, the older I get, the more intimidating the exposure becomes. For the writing, I think it’s because, back then, people were impressed that I was writing a novel at that age. Now, the novelty is gone. I’m one in what seems like forty million people who want to be a writer. I like to think in the ensuing years I’ve grown a thick enough skin that if one of the three people who have seen this thing were to say, “You know, I hate to say it, but it really sucks,” I could handle it. I see myself at a place right now where I can come up with other ideas or take a segment of this and turn it into a different beast. Spin-off someone somehow. Backup ten years and tell the story from there. In college, I begged people for help because I dreaded the inevitable soul-sucking email that said, “How old are you – 10? Because this blows chunks.” (That’s what we said in the late 90’s, right?) But now, if you like it, I want to know. If you hate it, I want to know. If you like scenes 3 and 7 but hate everything else, great! Like all of it but really could do without that one particular kid? Wonderful! Thank you for making that decision for me!

But perhaps the biggest struggle is putting time into perspective. When I was writing in college, none of those friends had kids or spouses. A couple of them worked, but we were on IRC for hours upon hours upon hours a day, into the wee hours of the morning. I’d send someone a chapter and have detailed, line by line feedback four hours later. My readers now have families, kids, jobs, hobbies, lives. And learning to remind myself that it’s not all about me and that a couple of days silence is not an “Oh, God, how do I tell her this really, really sucks?” but rather a “Dude, I just haven’t had time to sit down and read through 71 pages the way I want to,” is proving to be a difficult task.

This time, the story is flowing. The characters are present. I am writing. But the waiting to find out if that writing resonates, if what I’m seeing in my head is translating onto the page, seems interminable. And while my battered and well-read (and obviously largely forgotten since I’m pretty sure I’ve broken every single suggestion laid out in both books for how to write in this post alone) copies of On Writing and Bird by Bird still sit on the shelf just above my monitor, it seems like what I need at this particular moment is a book titled “On Being Read: How to Survive the Eleventy Billion Eons Between Sharing Your Work and Receiving Feedback (Even If It’s Only Been 24 Hours).”

It’s a big week for me this week.

Ha! I say that like I’m the only one. Whatevs.

It’s a big week. The documentary I did the first cut for waaaaaaaay back in God only knows when, “The Newport Effect,” is finally premiering to a small theatre audience in Charlotte on Thursday, then going to air on the local PBS a couple of times in the next couple of weeks (gee, THANKS, producers, for telling me THAT! I had to read it online today! Gah!) before hopefully getting picked up in a few more markets.

I’m battling some demons around this doc. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with the finished product, which I haven’t seen yet, but I saw a version late last year that was mindbogglingly good. I’ve seen just about every moment of footage they had to work with, listened to 90%+ of the interviews top to bottom, cataloged and digitized a decade’s worth of stuff, photos, everything. If what they had to work with is any indication (and it absolutely is), this is gonna be tremendous.

So, no. Nothing about the doc itself. My demons here are because I flaked. The producers, who are also dear friends of mine, might argue that point (and I would argue right back), but the editing started at a really odd place in my life and it seemed every time we sat down to work on it, a migraine flew out of nowhere or Earl was sick or something else came up. I was restless in my career choice, they were in a lot of ways distracted with other things, and while I have remained a huge supporter of the project, my actual, physical workings with the piece sadly ended before it really got started. Over the past few years, as it’s progressed into its later stages (this thing has been a true labor of love in SO many ways), I haven’t snagged all the opportunities I’ve had to ride along with it, to check in and see what’s going on, and it’s made me very sad. I feel like I’ve let people down, like I’ve let my friends down, and, mostly, like I’ve let myself down. And when I feel down, it’s harder for me to try to nose my way back in, so in a way I’ve just abandoned it, and them, because it just wasn’t comfortable for me to own up to the fact that I flaked like a cornflake.

See, these are the same producers who did “The Spirit of Sacajawea” a few years back. They took a tremendous leap of faith bringing me, a total unknown, on as their offline editor. It was an unbelievably crazy move: “Hey! Let’s hire this chick we don’t know from Adam except for ONE friend who has worked with her a handful of times on a show as far removed from a documentary as you can get, and OH WAIT! We want to cut it on an editing system she’s never used before, but she says she’s willing to learn as she goes. She’s got the equipment and the software and, well, we’ll just pretend the 5 month old isn’t there. She can’t even sit up by herself yet anyway, so we’re good.”

Two months later…

(TechPapa wishes to point out that, even though I am editing in Final Cut, I at least love him enough to use an Avid mouse pad. In fact, for ages whenever someone would ask me what I cut it on (meaning the software) his very quick answer was “The dining room table!” Moving on…)

I cannot tell you how many hours I logged on that doc, but it did not matter one whit. I became as passionate and emotionally invested in it as they did, and it made it exciting and amazing and such a learning experience. (The Emmy I ended up winning for it wasn’t too shabby, either).

When they asked me to be a part of Newport, I jumped in with both feet, squealing at the top of my lungs. Hell, yeah, I wanted to be a part of that! As I started pulling in insane amounts of footage, I loved every piece, every moment, I saw. I quickly became passionate, emotionally invested, offered feedback and suggested changes and we tweaked and…then life happened, for all of us.

I didn’t see it through. And that’s what gets me. It’s not so much about the producers or the project (which I still love deeply even if I haven’t seen it in its finished state yet). It’s about me and how difficult it is for me to sit here and wish I had made different choices and remained more a part of it all. Don’t get me wrong – I’m still in the credits, I think (although I’m a bit interested to see *how* because…[shrug]), not that it matters to me. I just hate that I’ve missed the journey. I don’t carry many regrets in life, but that one….

I am so looking forward to the premiere on Thursday. There are people coming in who have been a part of the Newport Folk Festival (the centerpiece of the doc) for years, decades. Impressive people are coming. It’s going to be AMAZING, and I can’t wait to see the friends I made during the three years we made the trek to Rhode Island for the fest. I can’t wait to see how this big, mystical, magical puzzle that I was so closely entwined with in its infant stages has blossomed into a full-fledged feature-length documentary. I can’t wait to remember some of the gems from the interviews that made the cut and regret the ones I still remember that didn’t. I can’t wait to see how it has all played out, shaped by someone else’s hands, morphed from the skeleton it was when I left it to what is surely a wonderful piece now. And I can’t wait to see it, come awards time, get its shot at some trophies because, dammit, it deserves it. The people who have lived and breathed this thing, nursed it and coddled it and shaped it for years, deserve it. And when it wins, I will jump up and down for joy and whoop and holler.

Then, as shallow as it sounds, I’ll curl up into my pillow and try to come to terms with the fact that it could have been me again…if only I hadn’t flaked.

September 11 has always been this very odd thing for me – simultaneously abstract yet starkly, heartrendingly REAL.

I wasn’t home, not even close. It was an hour that was in that confounding span of incredibly late or incredibly early, depending on which hour bed had beckoned. That particular night before, the night of September 11, 2001, was a late one.

Did you catch that? This is where my rabbit hole surrealism comes into play. My September 11, 2001, was a beautiful, sunny day. I was staying with a dear friend for a few months. She’d gotten up on the morning of the 11th, gone into work at her job in airport security, and I’d lounged around for a bit, playing with the cat and checking in on friends and family online. I did laundry, thankful that, for once, I hadn’t flooded the entire house in the effort, and took a load out to hang on the line out back. The temperatures were warming up slightly, and I likely hummed as I listened to planes fly overhead. Rachael come home, fixed dinner, and we ate as we watched a few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (she was desperately trying to convert me to a Buffy geek) and had a couple of glasses of wine before turning in for the night. She turned in earlier than I did since, well, she had work in the morning, and I stood up and futzed around online for a while before heading to my room after midnight, my September 11, 2001, tucked nicely into my pocket of wonderful days spent hanging out in Lower Hutt, New Zealand.

So now you see, the September 11, 2001, that I lived was a completely normal day. It wasn’t until my mother phoned just after 2 a.m. on the 12th that my world tilted on its axis. On her side of the globe, in the eastern time zone, it was around 10:20 a.m. on September 11.

The first tower had just fallen. All hell was breaking loose in my homeland.

After Rachael thrust the phone at me with much sleepy frustration (she may have even pitched it at my head), my mother implored me to turn on CNN, and I grumbled about the hour and tried, on an hour of sleep and a couple of glasses of wine, to explain, “Mom, we have a different CNN here. The same thing that’s on THERE isn’t going to be on HERE.”

“Just. Turn. It. On. This will be on. We’ve been hit.”

My brain immediately went to a nuclear attack. Who had bombed us? Had we bombed back? What was going on?

Whatever was going on in my head was obviously coming out of my mouth, because I remember the tone in her voice when she said, “Well, there is no more World Trade Center. The Pentagon…and now they’re saying the state department has been bombed.”

I turned on the TV and, sure enough, it was the same CNN. As my brain fought to figure out what I was seeing, the second tower collapsed. I know at some point, Mom and I disconnected, though it was certainly not the last phone call exchanged that day.

Around 4 a.m, Rachael, who, as I said, worked in airport security at Wellington’s airport with Air New Zealand (who trains with El Al’s security teams), got dressed. “I’m going to go on in,” she told me. “Maybe I can get off early if I go on in, since they know you’re here.”

It didn’t work that way. She made the 40 minute trip to work only to have the remarkable people she worked with tell her to go home. She had an American there, and that was where she needed to be.

As New Zealand woke up, the phone in the bungalow began to ring. People I barely knew calling to check on me – was my family alright? Was there anything they could do? Even the landlady, whom I was never sure knew me from Adam, came by to see how I was. And Rachael’s parents, who lived a few houses up the street, opened their arms to me like I was their own.

I remember watching TV. I remember being comforted when I found a channel that was carrying Tom Brokaw’s broadcast. And I remember venturing out later in the day. I’d been away from the states for 2 months; I wanted to put my eyes on something undoubtedly American. I asked Rachael to drive me to the American Embassy in Wellington.

This greeted us at the end of her street. I heart Anglicans.

Now, I had been in New Zealand, a country still under British Monarchy, in ’97 when Princess Diana died. I remember the reactions from then. What greeted me at the American Embassy nearly brought me to my knees.

In the guard hut, there were posters left by school children and other Kiwi well-wishers.This, for my country. My home. It was incredible and completely humbling. The prayer and memorial service I attended a couple of days later at a huge Anglican church in the Hutt is something I will never forget – so powerful, so gut-wrenching. I sat in the front row, tears rolling down my face, the only American in attendance aside from the U.S. ambassador’s wife, who spoke, grateful and elegant. I have yet to this day ever heard “The Star-Spangled Banner” played like that big pipe-organ played it that night, to a packed house, haunting and ethereal and deep.

These are my memories of the ubiquitous, terrible day known as September 11, skewed by the odd knowledge that my September 11 had been completely normal. I watched TV for days on end, riveted and trying to make it real in my head. I blogged, I culled headlines from around the world, researched, buried myself in information and knowledge to help myself reconcile where I was with what was going on at home.

It was 12 years ago and a half a world away. Every year, it becomes a more distant memory, made more difficult to hold onto by virtue of it being so incredibly different from the experiences of every other American I know. But on this year, ever year, I rededicate myself to remembering. I have to. I have a daughter now, 4 years younger than the events of that day. I have to fight to remember so I can make sure she understands, that she knows what happened and why we must remember.

And so that she knows that, even 9,000 miles away from home, it’s possible to find people and places that can feel like home when there’s nothing you want more to be at your home, in your bed, holding your family. That, despite the terror, the incredible, insurmountable bloodshed, there can be good. Oh so much good.