Ever since my parents, in their eighties were searched and told they were on a terrorist watch list at the Houston Airport I have become very cynical about the idea of that the U.S. is really looking for terrorists. Especially after I found out that for the most part, trade cargo that goes into our ports is not searched.
Yes, 9-11 really happened. I remember a few minutes before 9 am, I am walking through the lobby of the campus library and my daughter calls me on the cell phone.. A plane just crashed into a building in New York... The next couple of days seemed surreal (I can imagine how it must have been for people in NY City).
That afternoon I went for a 3 mile walk with a friend and felt kind of disrespectful to be out exercising. The strangeness climaxed the next morning. I was driving somewhere about 8 am in my son's beat up Mazda (that had no left mirror or current inspection sticker) when out of nowhere a women and a school aged boy ran across the street right in front of me. It was not an intersection or a school zone. They just appeared. I think they were Latino and I don't think the mother spoke English. Anyway, thank goodness my reflexes (and the old car's brakes) were in top form. I stopped within inches of hitting them. For a split second I thought of the horrible horrible possibilities if I would have hit them, and was so thankful I didn't.
When I stopped, a woman in a new black Mercedes was about to make a hurried turn and hit my car. The damage to my son's car was minimal, but her Mercedes had one side really wrecked up. The woman was trim with short blonde hair. She was wearing hospital scrubs. She jumped out of her car and started screaming at the boy and his mother. F___ YOU! F__ You! She could be heard a block away. She continued to curse (but at least she wasn't screaming). She was late to work, she was upset about her car. Then she started crying as she told the those of us standing around that her husband was in New York and she had not heard from him since the day before. She was upset and angry that her patients were waiting. She was a anesthesiologist at large hospital in the Texas Medical Center. She says she was late for surgery. I thought to myself, thank goodness I'm not one of the patients.
An Officer arrived and he nicely asked me to sit in the front seat of his car... he talked to me for a while and gave me his phone number, saying to call him if I needed anything or had any questions. I know he did not ask her to sit in the car. Maybe he was scared to.
The child got to school and I'm sure his mother trembled as she went back home. I was embarrassed about being caught driving my son's old car, but the nice officer didn't give me a ticket for the sticker and I went on my way. I guess the anethesiologist went on to surgery.
Now that its been six years, I think of where our lives intersected. The immigrant woman with a young child, an American Latina who was embarrassed to drive a beat up car, and a blonde anethesiologist who screamed obscenities at people when she was afraid.
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