Losing My Religion

I read The Man Who Walked Between the Towers to C Thursday night. He chose it from the little library based on recognizing it from a poster we have of Caldecott-award-winning children's books. The book is about Philippe, a street performer who strings a cable between the twin towers in 1974 and does an early morning high wire act before being discovered and arrested.
On the second to last page of the book there's the sentence, "Now the towers are gone." The last pages talks about the memory of the towers and of Philippe's walk.
My son immediately picked up on this.
"Why are they gone?"
"They fell down."
"How did they?"
"There was a fire."
He would not let up. He wanted to know how they got on fire so I lamely tried to explain that some "bad men" started the fire.
"Why did they?"
This segued into a talk about how sometimes people are afraid of other people who are different from themselves and how sometimes we just don't know why other people do the things they do.
Then he wanted to know how the bad men got the building on fire and because I'm not a creative enough liar I had to tell the truth, which led to an entirely new discussion about how airplanes and cars can explode if they crash into things.
Then we went upstairs and said goodnights but I could tell he was still pondering it.
"I don't know why someone would want wreck down a building," he said as I turned out the light.
"Neither do I."
"I hope someone got those bad men in jail."
On Friday I had a check up with my dermatologist and I complained to her that I was loosing more hair than usual. It's all over my sweatshirts, the kid's sweaters, the back of my chair at work. Dr. Barnett seemed to think it was stress related though she did send me off for a blood test just to be sure.
Since then, I've been chewing over the stress factor. Have I been more stressed out this year than last year? Now I'm not sure if my hair is falling out from external stresses or from the internal stress of wondering whether I'm stressed out or not. She mentioned things like getting divorced or moving to a new house. These are the kind of big-stress events that would cause ones hair to fall out. Not the normal everyday stresses of wondering what I should do with the rest of my life or of having to explain the events of 9/11 to a four-year old.

song: Losing my Religion • artist: R.E.M.