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Angels of our better nature
It was early in my third year in South Africa. Kids and teachers had just settled into the year. It was warm for September. Warm and dusty and quiet with the kids gone for the day except for the few staying on for after school activities. Little is as quiet as a school after hours.
Walking down the covered passageway someone said a plane had hit a building in New York. It sounded a bit wild and improbable and we heard all kinds of stories about wild events just around the corner; hijackings, home invasions, brutal robberies, wild west shoot outs at the malls.
I shrugged and kept on going. We didn’t have a lot of tech in the school, the connectivity was iffy at best.
A little later someone else had a bit more information, still sketchy but enough to make us all uneasy. Something was going on out there. Something big enough that trickles were reaching all the way to the top of a ridge above Johannesburg in South Africa, something from home wasn’t right. I thought of my sister and brother who were in Manhattan.
Wonder turned to anxiety and we hurried home.
Turned on CNN
and there it was
the one tower burning
and just then the second plane hit
again and again and again
the news in an endless loop reinforcing the…
