2001 – The Missing Christmas Letter

This is a combination of parts of a Christmas letter that I never sent out as well as thoughts accumulated during the months after 9/11. It was finally all put together around March of 2002, right after the 6th month anniversary of the attack. To those of you who received some of these thoughts originally in personal email or conversations or phone calls, thanks for helping me to wrap my head around all of this, and for letting me share those thoughts with others.

2001 started out fairly normally - even auspiciously. We took a family ski trip to Gore mountain in upstate New York and we had a great time. Paul and Mayumi took some ski lessons, and by the second day Paul was skiing the advanced intermediate trails leaving me in the dust. (He did later, however, learn a lesson about over-confidence as he attempted to take on a 3 foot jump - and lost. He walked funny for about three days but was fine after that [aside from the ocassional quacking noise he still emits]).

In the spring, Paul and Mayumi both played T-ball on the same team which I helped assistant coach (the job responsibility of the assistant essentially consists of making sure the kids don't kill each other with the bats as they are awaiting their turn at the plate). At first Mayumi had no interest in playing, but spurred on by Paul she joined the team and on her 6th birthday she played a game where she actually made 3 unassisted outs at second base! (Well, OK, that's not extremely difficult in a league where you can touch the base with the ball as the runners try to figure out where second base is - but still, she was pretty proud and so was I).

OK, swishpan from personal life to professional life: As summer neared, things at Teachscape got pretty bad. The markets were tanking and showed signs of only getting worse. Our investors were putting the pressure on us to really reduce our costs. The year previous to this we actually survived a similar trauma by going without pay for a couple of months and praying that the funding would work out. This time however, with real investment money in the company, that would not work. So we had to cut 20% of our staff, including one person that worked directly for me and two others that used to. It was that experience that fundamentally changed the way I thought about what the company now is. When you first start an entrepeneurial venture and it is you and a hand full of people you tend to think that the project you have devoted yourselves to is inherently tied up with the team. At some point though, if you've done your job right, the project - the thing you have built - has become a thing in its own right (and that's actually why investors have chosen to put money into it). And the idea can survive with or without that team - and if you really believe in it you want it to survive even if the team does not stay in tact. Do I sound like I'm justifying myself? That's probably because I am....

Well that was bad, but a little while later things started to turn up a bit. We ended up winning a contract to develop a system to help California train elementary English Language Arts teachers state-wide and this would mean other referrals as well. Of course, as with all large public sector contracts, the difference between getting the business and actually getting paid can be substantial (I think we are still waiting for a check).

Back to the personal... Later in the summer - mixing a bit of business and pleasure - I took the family on a trip to Amelia Island, Florida. We had a great week at a hotel on the beach and Paul and Mayumi swam so much we had trouble pulling them out of the water. In the process, they both became fairly decent swimmers (and, not coincidentally, grew gills).

I also started playing guitar again with a new contemporary Christian band that we formed at church. Two guitars, drums, keyboard/bass, and piano. The drummer (the leader), the keyboard/bassist, and piano have all played professionally. They are quite serious musicians and know all this stuff about sound equipment, and grounding hum, etc, etc. My role is to be the guy with the dumb look on his face who does what he's told. Actually, it is really cool in a number of ways. Because the stuff we play is not your standard church folk tunes, it is challenging musically. It has also introduced me to contemporary Christian music, which I have to admit, I was never really into - because I guess I never realized there was stuff out there that was that I'd actually enjoy listening to and playing. It has also forced me to buy myself "the pod" (a digital signal processor that basically emulates every effect, amp, and cabinet combination ever invented for the guitar into one little package you can hook up to your computer) for my birthday. (OK, so maybe I wasn't actually forced to buy the POD, but you can understand how difficult life would be without it, right?).

In September we trekked back to the Detroit area, as Michalle got married to Dave Bogdanski (a great guy - and finally someone she deserves) on a gorgeous day in a gorgeous ceremony that was picture perfect. Mayumi was the flower girl and the whole family (surprise, surprise) had a great time (pictures of the wedding can be found in the "Gallery").

Also around this time, we started two large home renovation projects: redoing our yard, patio, walkways, etc and remodeling our upstairs into a proper bedroom with office and walk-in closet. I also began a new responsibility as the superintendent of our Church Sunday School. I was psyched. I was working on a new format for the Sunday School and had planned a fun-filled, rocking Rally Day for the kids using some of the new music the band was playing.

AND THEN EVERYTHING CHANGED...

To understand a bit about my perspective on the attacks, I need to explain a bit about Manhattan and where I work. Manhattan is a long island - imagine a long, somewhat wide pencil with the tip pointing down. That's Manhattan. Except that you can't write with it. And the shavings don't get all over. But otherwise, that's Manhattan. The World Trade Center was located pretty much on the tip. My office is located on the left edge of the pencil where the paint starts to give way to the tip. (OK, enough of the metaphor...).

I went into my office early on the morning of September 11th. I heard the report of the first plane crash on the radio at my desk. And then the second (although there was a lot of confusion because one of the local reporters talking to an eyewitness thought he was hysterical when he described a SECOND plane running into the towers). I decided to see for myself what was happening (the window in my office looks the opposite direction - north - directly framing the Empire State Building). I walked outside to look south down the West Side Highway. My skin still crawls and my stomach tightens when I remember what I saw looking up: Those two huge towers which dominate a good part of my walk down 8th avenue in the morning, with enormous gaping holes and flames and unbelievable billows of smoke. It reminded me of the scene in 2010 where Jupiter is imploding. But this was real. I stood there, mouth agape in the middle of the street along with maybe 150 other people. After some period of time, I walked back to my office where everyone was gathered around the TV screen. As we watched, the south tower collapsed, and we were in shock. Then the north tower collapsed, and most of the room broke into tears. I had to walk back outside because I just could not believe it. Where those towers once stood, there was this huge, body of smoke; but no towers. Not even a shade against the sky, or an outline that said "we were here". They had utterly collapsed.

Then came the streams of people walking north up 8th avenue past our office: Some covered in ash, all wearing faces of disbelief looking like the living dead. At this point I was desparately trying to call Sugayo to let her know that I was OK. But of course, the phones lines were overloaded. When I finally did get through, she informed me that a friend of ours (her best friend's husband) had been in the north tower and had contacted her friend after the collisions but that they had not heard from him since. I decided I'd better get home. Of course that was easier said than done, as they closed all of the bridges and tunnels into and out of the city. I was finally able to find a crazy limo driver who said he'd take me and another guy from work back home. We trekked way north up the Hudson river and managed to cross over in upstate New York and get back to NJ that way. After that long, long drive I finally, impossibly, made it home to give Sugayo and the kids a huge hug - and thank God for them, and keeping us safe.

The next week we spent a lot of time with our extended family at church, trying to find out who had been affected and what we could do. We made phone calls to everyone in the church to find out if they had been affected. Miraculously everyone we knew was safe. It turns out, our friend had made it out as had a few other members of our congregation. For some - like our friend - this had been their second survival of an attack on the towers. It would end up being the last. (It turns out I DID know someone who was on one of the planes - not really well - but I had worked with him on a project at CBS.) It never really did sink in. All those lives... Our town lost one person (the father of a young family), a town just 30 minutes south of us lost 26.

It took about a month for the lump in my throat and the dry sobs to go away when I picked up the New York Times, which was running an obituary page honoring about 12 or 15 of the victims in every issue after the attack until. I think I calculated that the feature would need to run until the following September to pay tribute to all of the victims...

Slowly, the pain began to ebb and life seemed like it was returning to "normal" - with all kinds of small differences: more than once we had to evacuate the bus terminal because of bomb threats, a stack of newspapers was piling up next to my desk because the newspaper recycling bins had been removed from the bus terminal so as not to act as hiding places for bombs, people couldn't seem to get anywhere in the city without encountering a delay because of a train being stopped for a "police investigation" (or for no explanation at all). Our office was two blocks north of the restricted zone where they shut everything down and our phones (the main lines of which ran under the World Trade Center) were down for weeks. And, of course, there was the skyline. Every evening as my bus comes out of the tunnel on the NJ side of the river, there is this usually fantastic view of the Manhattan skyline. But now it seems to have shifted North - because the southern-most visual anchor is now the Empire State Building, 2 miles north of the where the towers stood.

Next came the anthrax scares, hitting places we knew, including CBS. At that point I was starting to become a bit unnerved. Walking past that huge public edifice, the New York Post Office across the street from Penn Station with those famous words inscribed on top of those huge columns "Neither rain, sleet, or snow...". The workmen who built that had no conception that someone would take our most basic, mundane communication network and turn it into a chemical highway. Maybe I would just permanently start working from home. But, wait, the same mail goes there - I guess hiding is not the answer. Finally, mercifully, those threats too subsided.

We got through it all, and life went on. We DID end up have a rocking Rally Day after mourning for a bit. We decided the kids had been inundated with too much disaster. (There was specifically one evening when we were at church two days after the attack and we were talking with someone who had lost a friend. As we were talking I caught this look of absolute sadness come over Mayumi's face. I decided the kids had had enough. From that point on I did not watch the news on TV, but only listened on the radio.) We did go on to play soccer and football with the kids. We did manage to stage the Sunday School Christmas program and blow the roof off while singing "Go Tell It on the Mountain." And somehow, I think we treasured all of these activities and the people with whom we do them more. Including the holidays, when we went back to Detroit where my sister had organized the 4th annual Chatsworth neighborhood Christmas party. Almost all of the old gang attended, and kids flew in from all over. It was a good thing to re-establishing those old ties again.

Oh, and I skipped something. Something totally unexpected that happened in October. Something so extraordinary that it caused me to get on a plane and fly across country, despite everything that was going on. I'm talking about the wedding of an old friend, Tom Hoehner. Despite Tom's best attempts to keep it a secret, I bumped into his mom who let on the news and then (despite Tom's explicit instructions), sent me a wedding invitation. I flew out to spend the weekend with Tom, his fiancee (Sidney - whom we call Sid), and some of his closest friends out there. We had a GREAT time which was brought to an appropriate conclusion when I convinced the guys in the wedding party to help me throw Tom into the pool during the reception at the country club. One guy protested, "you can't do that, that's just - just - mean." "Mean?" I said. "How well do you know Tom? You have NO idea." So we threw him in. The best part was that the reception was held at a very fancy, upscale, old-money country club in Pasadena (the one where the Rose Bowl parade originated) and was extremely tasteful (the 5 piece jazz band got a quizzical expression on their faces when we asked them to play "Brick House" [actually, 10 minutes later, the guitarist did a pretty good job faking it]). But there stood Tom, in the middle of this beautiful old Oak floor dripping wet. The room attendents were grabbing the linens off the table and following him around in their white Tuxedo jackets trying to mop up. He's never going back there for a wedding again.

I have to say that I also really enjoyed the morning of the wedding before everything started. You've heard of people closing bars, well Tom and I opened a few. It was really good to talk to him and laugh with him as old friends, to reconnect. Sometimes it is had to maintain connections with old friends - especially, I suppose - when we stop really making the effort. And it really does take effort. I have tried to, as much as my travels over the past years have allowed, to bend my paths to catch up with old friends. I treasure all of those people, all of those experiences. Having such friends and those connections, I consider myself a person who has truly, truly been blessed by God throughout my whole life.

And now especially so, and therein - given these awesome events - lies the paradox. I have the most wonderful wife who is strong and supportive, loving and challenging. Kids who are an absolute joy, they are at the best ages I can imagine - somewhat independent, fun to be with, they listen to their parents and still love them unconditionally (how much longer will that last? Too soon they will be teens...). I work at a place with a mission that I believe in with people who have become good friends and with whom I - at least 3 times week - end up laughing so hard that I have to wipe the tears from my eyes. We're part of a great church, which is a family to us and is a place which we feel is home and comfortable, and yet dynamic and growing. We live - and I am only slowly coming to realize this - in a great little town where half of the residents showed up on baseball's opening day to clean up the fields and reconstruct the bleachers together. I have been blessed with parents and siblings who love me and love being together. And my life has been filled with adventures and experiences which I could never have foreseen or asked for, but have been truly amazing.

So there is this feeling of true BLESSEDNESS, of being smiled on by God, of leading an absolutely charmed life.

And then a few days ago there was March 11th, the 6 month anniversary...

I took the long way into work that day and walked back down the Westside Highway (that's the left edge of the pencil, almost to the tip). At exactly 8:46 am I was standing in precisely the place I stood on that day, looking up at the - now empty - sky. This time, there were not 150 people. There was just me. And my heart ached, and the dry sob came back. I said a prayer for all of those families who were still coping with loss and I felt for them. But then I went back to work, and to my charmed life.

And so it goes. Paul and Mayumi are now playing baseball on separate teams and between that, scouts, school events, Sunday School, Stephen Ministry (which Sugayo and I are both participating in), the Japanese mission at our church, work, and all of the on-going home renovations (the painting will never end) we seem too busy - at times - to take note of either the sadness or the joy. Or to catch up with friends and let them know what is going on in our lives.

I suppose this incredibly long missive is my way of doing just that.