By JOSEPH KELLARD
"After my teacher, Mrs. [Betty] Bavaro, read it she just smiled. She was speechless," Megan said.
Bavaro's reaction is understandable. How often does any teacher receive an absence note from the President of the United States?
The previous day, 12-year-old Megan and her brother, Joseph, a freshman at Oceanside High School, had visited President Bush at the Oval Office. They were there to commemorate a special occasion, when their grandfather was unexpectedly thrusted into a meeting with the commander-in-chief.
Three days after terrorists crashed airliners into the Twin Towers, Bush visited the decimated site. Bush stood atop the demolished remains of a fire truck and spoke through a bullhorn to the rescue workers that encircled him. All the while standing next to him was Bob Beckwith, a 30-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department and 44-year resident of Baldwin, who had jumped on the truck to check its stability, but was then asked by Bush to stay with him.
Some workers yelled to Bush that they couldn't hear him, and he famously blared through the bullhorn that he and the rest of the world could hear them and that "the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon." He put his arm around Beckwith as the crowd chanted "USA! USA!"
On Monday, Feb. 25, Beckwith took up an invitation to a dedication ceremony in which Governor George Pataki presented Bush with the bullhorn he had used that day. Accompanying him to the White House were his wife, Barbara, two of his nine grandchildren, Megan and Joseph, and their parents, Peter and Christine, Beckwith's daughter.
On the president's agenda that day was a First Lady luncheon with nationwide governors and their wives. So while waiting for the president outside the Oval Office during their two-hour stay, the Beckwiths and the Clancys met Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condalezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, Governor Pataki and many others. Each family member described everyone they met as "nice" and "polite."
"Then the door to the Oval Office opened and the President said, 'Come on in. Come on in,'" said Joseph, who that day was celebrating his 15th birthday. "He was so polite, and he told us about the history of his desk and how he and his wife had designed the carpeting in the Oval Office. He brought us out into the Rose Garden and talked about the Magnolia tree, and he pointed out the sitting room and his daughter's rooms in the White House. It was amazing."
"I was a little nervous at first," Megan said. "But then when I went in I was very calm because he would talk to you like he was not the President but just an ordinary person."
During their travels throughout the White House, Megan asked the President about the whereabouts of his dogs. They were taking their mid-day nap, he joked.
For Megan, whose most indelible image of Bush is when she watched him on TV embrace her grandfather at Ground Zero, seeing him in person was "really amazing. Very cool," she said.
"When my granddaughter said to the President, 'You know, I took off from school today,' he went behind his desk and wrote notes excusing her and Joseph from class," Beckwith said.
"The president was so warm and just wonderful with the children," said Christine, one of the Beckwiths' six children.
Briefed about Joseph's birthday, Bush presented him with a tie clip in the form of the presidential seal. Feeling obliged to give Megan a gift too, he handed her a presidential stick pin. The absentee note he wrote for Joseph was addressed to Oceanside High School, so that he could bring it to all of his teachers.
"My teacher Mrs. [Amy] Keyishian was extremely overjoyed to see the note," he explained. "Some teachers didn't believe it. So I brought in pictures that we had gotten off of CNN.com."
Bush said that he will send the bullhorn to his father's presidential library at Texas A&M University in College Station, where it will be part of the "father-son" exhibit.
"It's really an historic memento -- something we didn't choose, but it was one of those days that I'll never forget," Bush said during a press conference at the White House.
For the Beckwiths and the Clancys, their White House visit is something they will never forget, evident because they laminated Bush's original absentee notes and placed them in a manila envelope for safe keeping.
"It was a great feeling just being there and being able to shake the President's hand," Joseph said.
"The President is a great, down-to-earth man," Beckwith said. "I think it's great that he took the time out of his busy schedule to meet me and my family."
