Are You there God? It's me, Carolyn

The knocking on the door awhile ago was the mailman with a summons. We are in violation of Township laws requiring a pool that is clean and in good repair. I needed to talk to someone and it occurred to me there was no one to call. No close friends who could commiserate, no family who would have an answer because their answer isn't the same as mine...FILL IT IN!!! So I started to pray and it then occurred to me that God has been so busy with all the problems of the world, He couldn't possibly have been listening to my pleas. I'm not saying I don't believe. It was faith that got me through breast cancer and my husband's prostate cancer. It was God who brought me back into the fold that day on that cold operating table. But on the little things like lack of money to fix the house and yard and pay the bills and the health insurance and the broken down 16 yro car; He is mostly absent or at least isn't giving me a clue as to how to survive LIFE.

So here I am talking to you. You the people who happily or unhappily follow my sometimes blog posts. I need to vent and the cats aren't listening and neither is God, apparently. I don't usually cry but today the wellsprings have sprung and I can't seem to stem the flow. What do I do? How do I convince my family we can't repair the rips, tears and troubles of a 30 yro liner that long ago gave up the ghost. And that every year brings the neighbor's to their decks and backyard fences to complain. This time maybe the summons to appear in court and a fine may be enough to convince my DH and DS that the pool is NOT NEEDED anymore. I can see the backyard flat and smooth with no pool just lots and lots of dirt.

OK...thanks for listening...I'm going to go blow my nose and find out how much dirt it costs to fill in a huge, old, ugly, festering pool. I love you all for listening and maybe God will have the answer! At least He sent this quote my way earlier this morning: Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. -Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

9/11 Seven years and one day after

Yesterday was difficult. Seven years ago and still the wounds are raw. Although I am not a NYC resident I’m 30 miles as the crow flies from ground zero. And I remember. I remember the moment I first heard that a plane had hit the North Tower. My husband, his voice strained called and said, turn on the TV, a plane just hit the North Tower. No need for me to ask what tower, the Twin Towers had been a part of my view of the NY skyline forever. And then his voice saying, “this is no accident, look out at the sky”.


I did just as he asked. I walked out my front door and looked up at a sky that was so blue it hurt to look at it: a perfect, crystal blue sky that is so rarely seen along the Jersey Shore. In that moment of inattention, I missed the second plane colliding. But the screams of my children still inside were reason enough to rush back inside to see the South Tower engulfed in flames and black smoke. For hours we clung to the TV hoping against hope that somehow this nightmare would end differently.


Hundreds of books, movies, documentaries and magazine articles have been written about that day of national tragedy. CNN’s timeline is the best minute-by-minute capture of that tragic day: http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/chronology.attack/index.html


What I share is the view of someone on the fringes of the eye of that firestorm. Here then are the snapshots from my memory of September 11, 2001


· Doctor’s appointment at 1 pm. Dr. cuts it short; he’s on his way to Riverview Hospital just 12 minutes away to triage the injured who will be brought in by boat. In those moments we are still hopeful that he would be needed. No boat ever arrived with survivors.

· Driving up the shore road towards Atlantic Highlands watching the black plume of smoke drifting like a huge python along the horizon. Black smoke from the funeral pyre of thousands of innocents.

· Nearing the Highlands and having to detour on road after road to find a way to climb the hills and see the NYC skyline.

· Finding a huge section of land roped off and guards silently inviting us in to park.

· Silence as we leave the car and start our climb upwards toward the high lands through familiar streets suddenly unfamiliar in their mourning.

· Silence of the people coming down the hills, tears streaming from eyes both young and old.

· Silence at the zenith where we join hundreds lined up along the ridge watching across the bay at the black smoke rising from a suddenly unfamiliar skyline.

· Silence; prayers; whispers; tears; soft sobbing as we make our way back down the streets to our car. Patience as the line of cars await to fill spots as they empty.

· Silence in the empty streets; empty stores; closed malls.

· Silence as we finally locate a restaurant still open and are quietly shown to a table facing the TV.

· Silence; whispers; tears as we watch the telecasters grimly recounting the events of the last seven hours.

· Silence as we drive back towards home and stop at a convenience store to purchase editions of newspapers with screaming headlines.

· And finally the silence of that blinding crystal blue sky. No planes flying, just silence and tears and a blue, blue sky that we East Coasters now refer to as a 911 sky.