A Beautiful Tuesday Morning at Gould School

Classes were well underway on that beautiful Tuesday morning. At , where I then taught Language Arts, the halls were filled with children’s chatter. The kids still wore summer sandals and shorts, as they stood outside the school library waiting to choose books for the coming week.

As a bell rang, I dismissed a group of students and waved at MaryAnne Dietrich, the school librarian. Another teacher came to use my classroom, so I went into the hall to make copies. I saw the band teacher going the same direction, I paused and greeted her.

“Let me first check my voicemail,” she said. “Then I can tell you for sure which days to give me lunch duty.”

Lynne dialed a phone that hung on the wall of the computer lab, frowned as she listened, and pressed another button.

“Can you understand this?” she asked, pressing a button that made the message audible.

It was her husband calling from somewhere in the city. His words were garbled, but we heard “towers” and “collapse,” against a roar of background noise.

We shrugged at first; what could he possibly mean? We assumed it was a commuter problem and continued our errands.

I made copies and stuffed a warm piece of paper into each teacher’s mailbox. The paper was a schedule of the days each of us would supervise either the lunchroom or the playground.  

I preferred the playground, where I watched the kids bounce balls against the building; at least once each week, a ball bounced onto the flat roof, and the custodian tossed down tennis balls, Frisbees, and all manner of paper airplanes when he went up to clear leaves from the gutters after heavy rainfall. 

By the time I returned to my classroom, news had spread through the adults in the school. Parents coming to help in the library were alarmed by what they’d heard on the car radio. One teacher, who had heard only rumors, asked if we shouldn’t turn on a television, to show students the news in process. A mom, whose information was more current, shook her head no. 

As the morning wore on, a few children were picked up early from school. Adults shared rumors and worries; many North Caldwell parents worked in the city, as did several teachers’ spouses and parents. Gould School’s closest neighbor is the fire house, and our school secretary rode the first aid squad with many of the firefighters. She shook her head sadly when anyone asked her what she had heard. "Not good," she said. 

The losses of that day have taken years to comprehend, and the tight-knit North Caldwell community was touched first-hand. In the weeks that followed, teachers were counseled on how best to speak to students and to answer their questions.

But what I remember most—and best—is doing playground duty that glorious warm Tuesday at noon. For, while the adults were beginning to sense what happened at the Towers, we guarded our knowledge carefully from the children in our care.

Whatever this past decade has brought to them, Gould School gave its students one last hour of childhood innocence on Sept. 11, 2001.

The writer is the Local Editor of South Orange Patch.