Reply #50: looking after my landlady's 7-year-old daughter -- it was a very strange day

[Lisa]

A co-worker woke me up by calling me with the news about the attacks (I'm on the West Coast so things were already happening by the time I found out). I went upstairs to tell my landlady, and found her kid sitting alone in the living room, staring at the TV. It was a school day, and she should have been in class by then. Her mom was lying sick in bed, and was so out of it that when I told her about the planes, she just grunted and went back to sleep.

I turned off the TV set and made breakfast for the little girl. I have to admit that my large-scale worries were kind of swamped by the smaller ones -- why hadn't the kid's dad noticed that his wife was so ill, and taken her to school himself? How much of the stuff on TV had the kid seen and understood? I knew that I would have to get to work sometime (I was scheduled to teach a class that afternoon) and I was wondering if I should call the office and bail out, because I didn't want to leave the little girl alone in the house, with an unconscious mother.

Since then, neither the girl nor her mom seem to remember my being around the house that day. In fact, my landlady has complained about me "not being helpful" -- given all the things that were going on then, I have not argued with her because it seems rather petty (I have since learned that a grade-school friend of mine lost her husband on one of the airplanes).