For the Robbins family, so much was the same this past week, and so much was different.
Same little Panasonic television turned on in the kitchen of their cozy Victorian home on the North Side. Same backpacks, stuffed with homework, slung in the usual corners. Familiar dinners of fragrant grilled chicken or salmon with rice. The family seated around the kitchen’s wood-topped island. Same warm glow in the room as night fell.
And yet.
That little television in the kitchen flickered with what were, a blink of the eye ago, unimaginable pictures of hijacked planes attacking the World Trade Center towers, of charred wreckage at the Pentagon, of the president talking war.
All week, it was a mix of the mundane and the extraordinary, of comforting routine and profoundly disturbing change.
Amid the usual clinking of forks and passing of salt that first night, last Tuesday, 8-year-old Molly, with a sprinkle of her mother’s freckles across her nose, glanced again at the footage of the World Trade Center collapsing. She looked down for a moment, and said in a small voice, “Their parents aren’t coming home?”
Her mother paused before answering, and a look of pain washed across her daughter’s face. She finished dinner, then left the table early and retreated to the computer and her favorite Backstreet Boys Web site.
Twelve-year-old Jack looked queasy when his mother said she would wait and see before deciding whether to try to fly to California on Friday, as planned, for her brother’s 50th birthday party. Already, Jack was formulating plans for dealing with terrorists, ideas he would verbalize later in the week when his parents figured his thoughts had returned to school and computer games.
The Robbins’ oldest child, 16-year-old Clare, wondered aloud what form the country’s military retaliation might take.
Parents Mary Ryan, a stay-at-home mother, and Alan Robbins, a dentist, glanced at each other before Ryan paused again, then told the truth: “I don’t know.”
For this family, and many families like them, last Tuesday’s terrorism, blessedly, did not touch their lives in any immediately tangible way, save Ryan’s ultimately canceled airplane trip.
Instead, the sobering implications of what has happened seemed to seep through the television and into their comfortable home like an invisible gas, leaving everyone feeling different but not sure exactly how.
Revising plans
The routine things — washing dishes, walking the dogs, even doing homework — took on a comforting rhythm in a week when it was hard to know what to do.
Mary Ryan, 47, is not used to that feeling. Petite, down-to-earth, good-humored, with short auburn hair and what she calls “a map of Ireland” on her freckled face, Ryan is the friend people call for help. And with good reason. She knows what to do and doesn’t make a big deal of it.
A former reading specialist, she substitute teaches on a moment’s notice at her children’s grade school and organizes the household. She spells a friend whose husband is seriously ill with colon cancer, rocks to sleep the newborn of another exhausted friend. It is second nature for her to continuously run down a mental checklist of the people in her life and what they need, starting with her children.
But what do they need now to keep them safe and strong?
That first night, her children needed reassurance and explanations, and she gave them, as best she could. They all needed — Ryan and her husband too — to swap stories of where they were Tuesday morning when they realized a second plane had crashed into the second tower, then that the Pentagon was hit.
To her surprise, the fear Ryan felt about what happened Tuesday would grow more intense, and specific, as the week wore on.
“There are so many implications of this to think about,” she said later in the week. “The first day I was just so shocked. Now my mind keeps turning over and over.”
Could her son be drafted one day? How should the family travel from now on? Will her children need to learn to be tougher, more stoic, less trusting? Will their friends with Middle Eastern backgrounds be harassed, or worse?
They say you don’t remember days, you remember moments. Moments at your wedding, moments with your child, moments with your aging parents.
For Ryan and her family, that was true of what they have come to call “all this” the past week.
Hearing the news
For Ryan, “all this” unfolded Tuesday as she drove her green Toyota van along the usual route to take her two youngest children to Mt. Carmel Academy on the North Side, then headed south to drop off Clare at her high school, St. Ignatius College Preparatory.
Every few miles, another shocking bulletin came across the van radio. By the time she parked at home, the full series of hijackings and attacks were being replayed on the kitchen television.
She spent most of the day there, trying to absorb what was happening.
“I just felt sick,” she said. She called to see if a friend who often travels to Manhattan was all right.
For husband Alan Robbins, 47, work looked the same but sounded different. Patients and co-workers went about their business, but without the usual light-hearted banter. Gone was the steady drone of planes headed to O’Hare, familiar background noise at one of Robbins’ dental offices near the airport.
“It was really eerie, this quiet,” Robbins said, after arriving home late from work and pulling up a chair to the kitchen island. “It’s weird. It’s part of life you don’t think about.”
Over dinner Tuesday, and afterward, the three children told of the announcements made at their Catholic schools, the reassurances by teachers, the prayers.
Clare, a mature 16 and a good student, shook her head and described nonchalant classmates who told her to be cool and not sweat it. “It’s like they didn’t get it,” she said.
Jack, a 6th-grader and a whiz at computer games, listened intently, and spoke up only occasionally.
“How could anybody really want to do this?” he said. “How could you drive a plane into a building and not think about all the people you’re going to kill and their families? I mean, I would be afraid of shooting a duck with an arrow.”
Difficult to grasp
He couldn’t put himself in the shoes of the terrorists, and he didn’t want to put himself in the shoes of grieving families.
“I just feel so sorry for the people who died, the parents and their kids at home,” Jack said. “I could never imagine my mom dying. . . . Thank God my mom stays at home and my dad’s in a little office.”
That left the questions of his mother’s possible planned airplane flight.
“Can’t you just take a train?” Jack told his mother, who had not yet made the decision to cancel Friday’s flight.
Usually spirited with eyes that sparkle when she smiles, Molly watched the plane crash into the second World Trade Center tower once again. She covered her eyes and slid out of her chair. “Oh, it’s so bad,” she said. “I hate it.”
Her parents noticed she would leave the room periodically to get away from the talk of terrorism, then come hug her mother, or whisper a question in her father’s ear.
Already, they had decided not to keep the television on round-the-clock, but not to shield their children from the news, either.
“Kids are pretty resilient,” Robbins said. “I think it’s important they synthesize their own opinions.”
Molly was the first to bed. She spooned some pistachio ice cream out of a tin cup, then scampered upstairs to brush her teeth.
Ryan followed her daughter into her room, and she tucked her under the quilt.
A Britney Spears poster and tickets from a Backstreet Boys concert are tacked onto the bulletin board by the 8-year-old’s bed. A dollhouse sits on the floor.
“What a day, huh?” Ryan said. She snapped off the light and smoothed her daughter’s hair. They talked in their low bedtime voices about Molly’s 3rd-grade class, about Molly’s friends, about little things.
Then Ryan asked, “Did you pray in school today?”
“I’m praying right now,” Molly said softly. “I’m praying for the people.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I hope they’re all right,” Molly said.
“We’re pretty lucky, aren’t we?” her mother said.
Mother and daughter whispered some more. Molly wasn’t ready for her mother to leave.
More whispering, about how far away New York is, then Ryan stood up.
“It’s time to go to bed, sleepy head.”
“I love you,” Molly said.
“I love you too.”
As the week wore on, the moments that marked “all this” took the family by surprise at times.
Walking dogs Archie and Monty, Molly and her parents took time to appreciate a clear evening, to talk about normal things, to laugh about the way the dogs couldn’t wait to get out the door.
A child’s reality
But then Molly asked the question 8-year-olds across the country were asking their parents: “Are they going to bomb our house?”
Her parents reassured her that would not happen. Then, driving to school another day, Molly had another question. “Why do they hate us?”
On Sunday, the family attended services at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church. Ryan found her eyes wet, along with most of the rest of the congregation’s eyes, when, at the end of mass, the organ resounded with “America the Beautiful.”
Raised Catholic, Ryan sought comfort in her religion this week, and found some.
“You sort of want to be a part of something bigger with all this,” she said.
Robbins never gravitated to religion, and that did not change this week. He was raised in a home that was culturally Jewish, but not religious.
He found his thoughts turning to the weeks, and months, ahead.
“I hope we do the right thing,” he said.
“Whatever that is.”
