“In the face of great calamity, I personally find that most media sensationalizes and speculates and insults and depresses. I cannot stand seeing it. ýt the same time, it is important to acknowledge what’s happening,” writes Lisa Chisholm, a Juilliard-trained bassoonist living in Canada. “What I do find more graspable and real are personal accounts, such as a few I have received from my close New York friends. We are in the midst of something gigantic and world-changing, and although, for now, our daily lives continue on more or less as usual (except for those who are living in New York City or DC), we are all acutely aware of the fragility of it all, now more than ever. Mostly we don’t speak of it, though, because we’re scared. And if we’re not, we should be.” The following story is the entry from her daily writing log from September 11, 2001, which she has kindly allowed us to share with the Juilliard community.

		World Trade Center Tragedy: Juilliard Reacts Reflections on Loss And Healing Voice Box: Playing for the Fighting 69th

First thing in the morning, I got on the phone and started calling around to settle things up with my moving company. First Walt. He wasn’t in, but the shaky speech-impedimented secretary told me that my stuff was on its way to the 9 a.m. ferry. True? Was my stuff really arriving? Hard to imagine. Then I phoned Delores the Pickup Broker back in Ontario to see if we could sort things out financially, as I had asked for some recompense owing to my many lost hours of life (and also some work, now that you mention it) back in Toronto due to their many “oopses.” The dispatcher changed my pickup time thrice, got my address wrong twice, ultimately delayed my actual pickup almost two hours because she gave Ed and his crew no address and then the wrong address, and then neglected to have the goods scaled prior to shipping and told me definitively that my treasures weighed 1700 lbs., not the 2249 lbs. that Walt the Delivery Broker was now proclaiming. The whole ordeal had been hugely annoying, and I really didn’t feel I owed them 2249 lbs. worth of blood for their acute blunderheaditude.

We are in the midst of something gigantic and world-changing, and although, for now, our daily lives continue on more or less as usual… we are all acutely aware of the fragility of it all.

Delores wasn’t in yet (three-hour time difference from here to there) so I left a message with a receptionist for Delores to call me. I told her my name and was just about to give her my phone number when she said, “Lordy, have you been watching the news this morning? It’s incredible!”

I reminded her that all of my stuff, including any media-receiving devices, was in a truck on the way to a ferry somewhere. I asked her what was so sensational.

“A plane hit the World Trade Center,” she told me. Oh no. Maybe like the Concorde last year in France, I thought. I imagined a misdirected plane taking off a small corner of the satellite gear on top of the World Trade Center as it struggled to maintain course.

“Then another plane,” she said, “hit the other building, then they both blew up from bombs and now there’s nothing but a five-zillion pound pile of rubble and a whole lot of mayhem.”

Christ, on purpose?

My ears didn’t hear this right. My head spun. This was not possible.

“And the Pentagon too. Terrorists, you see. They’re attacking,” she told me.

“The World Trade Center,” I said.

“Yup,” she said. “Gone. It’s crazy.”

“You don’t know what you’re telling me. I know someone who works in the World Trade Center. You’re telling me the worst news in the whole wide world—” and then no more words would come out of my mouth.

She too fell silent, no longer excited to give me the horrific play-by-play of the events whose gravity had obviously not registered with her just yet. And so there we were, a secretary and a customer on the phone in awful silence. I unable to speak because I had effectively just been told that my friend had been blown to smithereens in a terrorist attack, and she unable to speak because the last time she spoke she had managed to drive a spear through my being and things weren’t bound to improve anytime soon.

I couldn’t even say the word “Bye.” “Wait,” she said, “your phone number!” It took all of my fortitude to say my area code, but actually no sound came out anyway, just my mouth moved a bit. I tried again, and again, and eventually I managed to get it out in barely audible squeaks of two or three digits at a time. Then I hung up the phone.

If ever I wondered how I would react to the news of a friend’s unexpected death, now I knew. It felt exactly like being hit over the head with a cast iron frying pan—like my $8 thrift store LeCreuset, maybe—and being underwater at the Y at age 6, looking safely through goggles and hearing the world in a surreal hum. Sounds muffled and amplified at the same time, calming at the Y only because you know you can surface at will and be in a clear world again with air and voices and movement. But when you’re not underwater on purpose, when your head is doing this to you against your will and as a result of grief beyond measure, there’s nothing remotely calming about it. The world zinged and swirled simultaneously in opposing directions using my head as its axis.

If ever I wondered how I would react to the news of a friend’s unexpected death, now I knew. The world zinged and swirled simultaneously in opposing directions using my head as its axis.

All I could think of was Susan. And Tim. And George and Andy. I remembered the first day I met Susan. I was wearing a yellow sweatshirt and wild flowered pants and my Birkenstocks, my Birkenstocks which I wore with bare feet until well into December because New York City did not feel cold to me then. I tried to act as grown-up as possible as I went to Susan’s millionth-floor law office in midtown, where she met me in a board room paneled with a small plantation’s worth of walnut. A mahogany table the size of a swimming pool sat in the middle of the room, like a board room from a law show on TV. Huge north-facing windows offered a perfect view of Central Park. “So that’s Central Park,” I said. Of course now I realize what a silly thing that was to say, given that a patch of green in the middle of Manhattan could have been absolutely nothing other then Central Park, but Susan thought it was suitably naive. “Oh, you really are new to New York, aren’t you,” she said. And so I was hired. Oh no, not in the smooth wooden office. In her home. To look after her kids.

Three days a week I went to their Upper East Side apartment and hung out with 11-year-old George after school, helping him with homework, making him grilled cheese sandwiches and noodles, and later, as we grew more comfy together, tickling, speaking in silly accents and making up fake names for everyone, doing pirouettes like video-game-basketball players and pretending to sing opera. Andy was 13, and spent his time in his closed room with his computer except for the occasional pilgrimage to the kitchen for a glass of coke and a few hunks of cheddar. Andy never failed to leave filthy fingerprints in the orange cheese. He’d never make it as a Cheese Thief.

Susan was an upwardly-mobile corporate lawyer in her late 40s who could easily have passed for thirtysomething. Her husband Tim, an engineer, was like a gentle Labrador retriever who had been magically turned into a person. A little while after I began looking after her kids, she switched law firms and got a snappy office on the umpteenth floor of the World Trade Center, and everybody was awfully impressed. This woman and her family had it all. They were successful. They were smart. They were nice. They loved classical music and loved having a “Juilliard Student” looking after their kids. They had a great apartment. They had great kids—kids who, despite my protestations, grew up and went to university. We kept in contact even after I left N.Y.C. Every Christmas I get a photo card of their Perfect Family. Susan and Tim came to see me this summer in two opera productions at Glimmerglass.

Now my head was reeling. Blew up? Blew up? I knew Susan left the house at the crack of sparrow chirp every morning. If the World Trade Center blew up, she was in it. Oh God. Tim. He would be stranded in New Jersey at his office, unable to do anything at all except ingest the impossible in futile protest as he watched it all on the news. George? He just started university at Princeton, and was probably just getting new textbooks and meeting new girls and trying to get through Frosh Week without too many embarrassing ordeals. Had he heard yet that his Mom was probably crushed, at best, in terrorist rubble? Andy, had he heard? It made me sick now to think of the dozens of photo albums Susan had made over the years, Martha Stewart-like, following the family through the years from the kids’ infancies until present.

I still didn’t really think any of it could be true. I would call her. Find the name of her firm and call her up and she’d answer the phone and everything would be just fine. Except I couldn’t find the name of her firm and frankly the phone lines were vaporized anyhow. Think. Call her home. Stupid, she’s not there. Stop shaking. Find her cell phone number, you have it in an e-mail from this summer. Why does the computer take so long to boot up. Where is that e-mail. Alphabetize, scroll, click, found it. Now phone! No, wait. What if there is death at the other end.

Pause.

Breathe. Breathe some more. Brea - dial!!

Ring... Ring… Ring… Why does it take so long between rings?

Voice mail. Perfect professional greeting, warm, cordial, made on a day when life was perfect. Take breath. Leave casual message. Say what? Are you alive? Something with more tact, maybe. What is tact anyway? Tact is not anything like what has happened this morning. Say this: “Hi, I am just calling to find out that you’re OK, so call me when you get a chance and let me know that you made it out alright.”

Christ, I just left a message on a dead woman’s answering machine. What is wrong with me?

In the same e-mail was Tim’s cell phone number. Call. Must call. He is surely a wreck right now. Don’t call. But I have to know. Call.

Ring… Rin—“Hello” says Tim.

Not said with the question mark at the end like it usually is.

Oh God, what do I say now?

Something like, “Have you heard yet?” or “Is she OK?” or “Have you heard from her?”

I am shaking. Waiting. Tell Me.

And it turns out that Susan’s firm moved her office two months ago to the Upper East Side. She’s alive. In a war zone and having possibly just lost every colleague from her W.T.C. office, but she is alive, and at this very moment that is all that matters to me.

Shudder sigh exhale inhale exhale inhale—oh this is what it’s like to breathe; I almost forgot.

And so I am spared the personal grief of having lost an important person to this massacre. And spared again when I learn that Harry, the 92-year-old blind man whom I tended to in his midtown apartment on weekends while I studied in N.Y.C., who had a year ago moved to an assisted-living complex less than three blocks away from the W.T.C., had suffered a very mild stroke three weeks earlier and was at the time of the disaster safely away in a hospital. He too is OK. So far all of my N.Y.C. friends are OK.

If my life seemed simple and perfect before, it is all that much more now. Simple to the point of stupidity, really, to think that while I was receiving boxes and furniture (yes, my stuff did finally arrive that day) and signing waybills (indeed, they reduced the moving fee back to the 1700 lb. charge, though frankly, at this point I didn’t give a rat’s arse about a few hundred dollars) and analyzing the Welcome Wagon (turns out, according to my cousin, there’s no cake and Tupperware with the Welcome Wagon, just a bunch of coupons followed by a mysterious and endless stream of junk mail until you move to the next town and alert the Welcome Wagon there of your existence, so it’s just as well I lost that brochure after all) and eating stoned wheat thins with tomatoes and beer cheese (yes, beer cheese; beer right in the cheese!), my beloved New York City was in the midst of a situation beyond comprehension.

I refuse to listen to the news. I refuse to read about it. I refuse to look at a picture, though I accidentally saw two front-page newspaper photos on the bus. I will not talk about the event in conversation, except with my fellow New Yorkers. So for now I just continue my sunny little life here, unpacking my white bowls with the blue stripes, arranging my new kitchen, and trying to push out of my mind the atrocity of what has transpired and what might still come. It is the only way I think I can handle it.

Lisa Chisholm studied bassoon at Juilliard from 1993-1996 and has been playing in Ontario for the past four years. She just moved to British Columbia to begin a position with the Victoria Symphony. She left her soul somewhere on the Upper West Side (in Fairway, she thinks, in an olive bin) and lives in hope of someday returning to New York to be with it forever.