Who needs NPR radio or Art Bell when I can hear up-to-date information about the US military from my voice students?

By Deanna Reitan

Tuesday Night, September 18th, 2001

My life seems fairly mundane compared to so many people I know in the "outside world", that is, the world outside of my studio. Here I sit, teaching around fifty private lessons a week out of a big older apartment tucked behind fields of hay growing and young black angus bellowing on the north hill of Puyallup, Washington. I'll teach 13 year olds how to sing Christina Aguellera with healthy vocal technique. I'll teach accountants how to sing Italian art song because they've always wanted to or the Pentecostal Christian techniques for gospel style belting. I have an ad in the yellow pages and the motto "If you can talk, you can sing" on my voice mail message. I just want to make a modest living doing something that I can do from home as I keep an eye on my teenage daughter's comings and goings. I'm not very politically oriented (I didn't even vote for president last year), and the best I do for the environment is recycle household throwaways. I admit I don't watch tv much and I listen to NPR radio with the local jazz station, but that's as far away from the middle that I tend to get.

I read the paper and email fwds from the more politically/social conscious minded and think and worry and ponder about our country's situation. But the motions of the military seem so distant and faraway. And who can really believe what you hear on radio programs or talk shows or the 10pm news on tv? Part of me wants to remain naive and think that President Bush saying "Wanted Dead or Alive" is just rhetoric and not really real. It's real. My singing students tell me so.

Tonight, September 18th, I ask 16-year-old student, Aja Washington how things are at her house since Tuesday the 11th. I know her father is a Marine or Army reservist; he only had just come home last July after a 4-month stay in Bosnia. ("To help people get along" he told me when I asked him what he would be doing there specifically. I thought that statement was a bit vague, but hey.. I don't dwell on these kinds of things.) Aja responded that the whole family has been quite upset because her dad has to leave in a couple weeks to a place that is to remain secret. "He's working for the FBI or the CIA or something," she says in that nonchalant way teenagers sometimes have when asked questions by adults. I stop with the questions and move on with her lesson but my heart feels heavy with the reality hit.

The information flow wasn't to stop with Aja. Two lessons later I had a 10-year-old girl trying me out for lessons. Earlier in the day I had discussed the appointment with her mother by phone, she is active Army at Ft. Lewis, and while I gave her directions to my studio I could hear a live Army band playing the star spangled banner. This is LIVE, not the radio or tv and the band is playing just outside this woman's office. Her daughter is definitely talented for a 10 year old; we finish the tryout lesson and I chat with the mom for a bit. The entire family are completely 100% Native American, from New Mexico, of Navajo extraction. The father was raised on a reservation and mom was a "city girl." If that wasn't interesting enough, (I know very few purely anything people, except my Jewish friend and my daughter's Russian piano teacher), the mom continued, saying her husband is in the Army infantry and that they were now in "lock down". This means they are not to contact their wives or anyone on the outside, but she knows that they are packing up to leave because the infantry husband of another Army wife breaks the rules and calls to tell what is going on. Mom has the pager and cell phone on constantly; she says "I'm waiting for his call, hoping he calls to say he's on his way home." But he doesn't call.

I wonder what the coincidence of having these two students tell me this information on the same evening means. I wonder if I ought to move past my complacency and be less mundane. I wonder if the people I hear on the radio and see on tv who exhibit all that anger and "let's bomb the hell out of them" speech would be so passionate if they were the ones being sent off to a place that couldn't be told to their families.

I went to the Seattle Center International Fountain flower memorial for the victims of the World Trade Center attack. I walked through silently, looking at the flowers, passing by the crying cousin furtively lighting votive candles around the picture of her firefighting relative. He's now buried under the 6 stories of rubble that was once a 110-story building. As I walked a military helicopter flew overhead. I went again the next day, dragging along my 16-year-old daughter who can't seem to think of anything but what she's going to wear to high school the next day. My 20 year old, who is a college sophomore, spoke intensely about her desire to protest military action and I listened, wondering where she got this fever. "Maybe it's a college thing," I think. That was Saturday night. Now it's Tuesday night, September 18th and I'm feeling feverish.

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