Making My Way Back to Cleveland

Since I didn't go to San Francisco (I still want to go. I'm still not sure why.) I went to my organic chemistry lab yesterday. The synthesis we were doing involved 2 hours of stirring and heating and I spent about half that time sitting at my lab bench, reading and writing. My professor stopped by and asked me what I was reading. Answer: a book on the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Not happy reading, but a little bit thematic since Case neglected to check the weather report and was heating the buildings, resulting in an ambient lab temperature of 84 F which was, of course, higher near the hot plates. We make small talk about how hot it is, wondering if maybe just this once we could do lab in bikinis and goggles, of course, for safety. She mentions her summer classes she's planning on teaching, and says she's going to leave after next year--that a class like this looks good on her resume. I find it sad that she wants to leave; although the class is predominately premeds who don't care about the subject matter, I genuinely like the class and her.

I asked what she was doing with her "second spring break" she was taking, and she said she wanted to relax at home and watch some movies, although she and her family were probably going to go to New York. Her daughter wants to see the Statue of Liberty and Ground Zero. "She says to me," my prof says in her really delightful accent, "Mom, did you know that something bad happened there? We learned about it in school."

She stops and looks at me, and I look back at her and am unable to articulate in time what I'm thinking: that we both have forgotten that our children will have to be taught what happened on September 11, 2001. That for generations to come, it will not be something that happened to them. I think about my grandparents and Pearl Harbor, my parents and Kennedy's assassination. I think about walking through the halls to have my picture taken in a pretty green sweater, seeing Kate come running (running, in our usually decorous halls) back from the office yelling "They're bombing us!" I remember how the principal didn't want to turn the TVs on, didn't want us to know. We didn't do anything in school that day, and I was in advanced chemistry when the towers fell. All after school activities were cancelled that day, and I went home and called my ex, who was the most politically astute person I knew. I asked him what would happen, and he told me we'd go to war with Russia. Ha.

All in all, I much prefer the Triangle Fire. Less loss of life, and in the end, the political activists won the day, and everyone is safer. I wish all stupid, preventable tragedies ended this way.