Hey Arnold The Movie

Can't wait to see the HEY ARNOLD movie on June 28th. I'm a big Nickelodeon fan. For a dozen or so days after September 11th, all we watched was Nickelodeon, so my six-year-old didn't have to see the news — maybe so WE didn't have to see the news. Next to the TV we had the boom box set up with headphones, so the grown-ups could listen non-stop to National Public Radio.

I had a very strange ongoing experience of mixing the video of Rugrats playing in the sandbox with audio of firefighters describing rescues at Ground Zero or seeing Hey Arnold in their downtown lot playing baseball and hearing mothers talking about their lost sons. It was good to know SpongeBob SquarePants was safe and sound, deep down under the blue ocean at Bikini Bottom while the rest of us were unable to open our mail, imagine a normal day at work or get on a plane.

Do you remember the weather that day? It was a beautiful September day — more like summer than fall. A week or so later there was a day with weather much like September 11th and I remembering being suddenly frightened when I went outside, some how feeling that such weather could again bring disaster.

Sometimes I don't recall how we all made it through that month of September. It was perilous. I remember feeling like, "just keep walking, one day at a time, don't look back, just make it to Christmas." And I remember feeling very sad and still barely breathing at Christmas, but relieved we'd made it through. There wasn't a thing you didn't worry about this past fall if you had half a brain or half a heart — terrorism, anthrax, racial/religious violence, high alerts, economic disaster — you name it.