I remember

Of course, the call to mindfulness
may have been a government ploy
to encourage people to drive
politely and safely. If so, it worked.

To remember is, literally, to call to mind, an act of supreme mindfulness. As we drove through Quebec this summer, Je me souviens (I remember), the province's official motto, flashed by on every license plate. Down here in Texas, we demand remembrance ("Remember the Alamo!") but putting remembrance in the first person softens it, personalizes it, brings with it a sense of inevitability. I choose to call to mind, to remember.

This has been a week of remembrance--appropriately so, since it is Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, a time of remembering and questioning, bridging the past and the future. A lovely poet, biographer, and publisher, Devorah Winegarten, died September 10. Although I didn't know her well, she was one of those people whom you felt you did know well, because she wore her heart and her life on her sleeve and on the pages of Facebook and in book fairs, libraries and Rotary Club meetings all over the country. My favorite memory of her was at the Austin International Poetry Festival this year. She had lost her voice and wrote an amazing, beautiful, funny poem about the well-meaning (and annoying) responses of friends, colleagues, and strangers. She read that poem several times, in a hoarse whisper, pausing at the perfect moments with a gleam in her eyes, taking a mysterious affliction that had cost her her job and threatened her livelihood, and turning it into a smart, witty reflection on how as humans we get compassion so right--and so wrong. She was both sweet and fierce, in the way that truly great Texas women are, and she will be long remembered.

Me, 2001
Is there a statute of limitations on faking sick?
I mean, the agency that replaced the agency I worked for
then has been replaced by the agency I work for now. 
Also, I've since replaced the person I worked for then.
State government is confusing.

Of course, for most Americans, a much larger, national remembrance has gone on this week, as we all call to mind September 11, 2001. Like many, I can tell you what I was doing as the planes hit the towers. I suppose that sufficient time has passed that I can safely admit I was playing hooky from work. I remember walking through the living room when my then-husband (who was watching CNN) called out, "Hey, there's been some sort of plane crash!"

At the time, I worked more or less where I work now (give or take a dozen job changes and reorgs, so probably less rather than more), with the training department. I heard later that people panicked. Participants and trainers begged permission to leave class and go home, and staff at headquarters circled TVs for news.

Judy, 2002.
This is the photo I have in my office.
PSA for people who refuse to let people take photos of them:
Get over it. Someday, you'll  die and people who knew you
for years will scramble around frantically for accidental
photos of you and all they'll come up with is a picture of
you in a depressing state conference room holding an award.

The September 11 I most remember, though, is September 11, 2004. We were living in Pearland. A few days before, I was home sick (for real this time). The doorbell rang, and I opened the door to find my friend, Angie. She looked me up and down and said, less as a question than a statement,"You haven't heard, have you?" She then told me my best friend Judy Schober-Newman had had complications from a minor, outpatient surgical procedure and was in a coma in Austin. On September 11 her husband called to say she was taken off life support.

Judy and my youngest daughter share a middle name with Hurricane Helene, and that makes me smile. Both Betty and her namesake are/were forces of nature: smart, quick-witted, sassy, determined, passionate, and headstrong. Betty is perhaps more destructive. Both are/were intensely, fabulously creative.

Hurricane Betty age 5.
Crazy hair, messy, adorably destructive:
not much has changed. 

Despite the decade and more of water under the bridge, I still think often of Judy, particularly since rejoining the training department four years ago. It's hard not to measure yourself up against someone you loved and admired so greatly, particularly when she's dead and you've gone on to attain the job she wanted when she was alive.

At the time, I saw myself as the lesser half of "Judy and Diana," a sidekick--even before the survivor's guilt kicked in. And, I won't lie, I floundered a bit thereafter. Then, of course, I got up, dusted myself off, and started building a life I could be proud of, and, in the process, built a life that I think Judy would have been pretty proud of, too. So my remembering these days is perhaps more fond than sad.

I remember hanging out in San Antonio hotel rooms and bingeing on junk food and talking half the night. I remember some of the absolutely insane things she'd send me through interoffice mail (which I returned IN PERSON because...yay, continued employment). I remember the email where she reminded me, in all caps, that I am NOT SUPERWOMAN. This is a lesson I've had to continue reminding myself over the years, many times (because--crazy Virgo perfectionist FTW!), and, whenever I do, the voice in my head always sounds exactly like Judy.

No matter what our religious beliefs, the dead are never that far away, whether waiting patiently in the heavens or present in the scattered stardust of plants and trees. All it takes is a quiet moment, the right invocation, and we call them to mind.