Remember Well (a reflection on 9/11)
This year
was the most normal I have ever felt on 9/11. I cried on the way to work, but
didn’t really think about it once I was teaching, and honestly, not a single
one of my students asked about it. I
handled storytime and activities, a research project, finding band aids for
small cuts and bruises normally and soon the day was over and I was out on the
Greenway running.
13 years
ago, I was 19 years old. I was in the process of rushing, and I was in early
morning classes, and I was busy almost all the time. That was during the time
of my most successful yoga practice too. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I
got up early and ran from my apartment to the gym (it was about 1 mile). Once
there I was running on the track, listening to a morning show, when it was
interrupted in what I thought was a joke at first. There was someone talking
about a plane crashing into the North Tower of the WTC. I thought it was the
most awful prank I had ever heard. Then, at some point, I slowed down, and
looked around me. I realized that no one else on the track was listening to
what I was listening to. I stepped to the railing and looked down onto the
basketball courts, where people were already playing. Everything seemed to be
normal. But somehow, it wasn’t. The run
from the gym back to my apartment was the fastest mile run I have ever clocked.
It took me less than six minutes. I
remember unlocking the door and grabbing frantically for our remote, turning on
the TV at exactly 9:03 a.m., in time to see Flight 175 fly into the South
Tower. I will never forget that moment of realization that something truly
terrible is happening. I yelled for my
roommates to wake up, to come in the living room, that something was happening.
We sat
silent, watching, as the smoke poured out. I started crying when I realized
that the falling things I was seeing were people leaping. And then, amazing, we had to make the choice
about whether or not to go to class. There wasn’t anything about whether or not
class had been cancelled. One of my roommates was desperately dialing a friend
she knew lived in downtown Manhattan, crying that she couldn’t get through. It
was before they asked us to stop calling, before we knew that the phone lines
were so overloaded they weren’t working.
I was unsure of what to do so I biked to school, and walked a few
minutes late into a somber, silent 9:30
English class and sat down. A girl at the back was listening to her
Walkman. She continued listening even as
our professor came in, a kind, middle aged man who made 18th century
literature as interesting as he could for 20 year olds. He asked if we had
heard what happened and everyone nodded. He paused and then said, “There
haven’t been any official announcements from the University, so we will have our
regular class today. “ He might have been about to say something else when the
girl with the Walkman broke in.
“The
Pentagon! A plane hit the Pentagon! Oh my God.” She burst into tears and we
stared.
“What? I
thought that was impossible.” I said slowly, and then there was a growing
murmur. I had watched a special on the Pentagon only a few weeks before, about
how it was the most secure building in the world, about things that made it secure.
“I’m sorry.
This was a mistake. I am officially canceling class. Please go and find who you
need to find. “ Our professor looked at
us again, with what I would come to know as an expression of realization. The realization that he had watched our
innocence taken away at about 9:45 on a beautiful Tuesday morning. We couldn’t possibly know how our world would
change after this. But even as we left,
as we walked out onto a somber quad, we knew that nothing would ever really be
the same again.
The days
that followed were ones of sadness, and grief.
Watching the news was watching people holding up pictures of the
missing, of firefighters digging through the rubble, of our President telling
us that the United States would find who did this and punish them. We were so
naïve we believed it would be that easy.
People cancelled travel, cancelled weddings, even. Parents grieved just
a little bit that their babies birth would be linked to a tragic event. The next year we grieved even more. The year
after did we grieve a little less? With each passing year, the memory becomes
more of a memorial, a day in which I remember every detail of that morning, but
also know that we no longer need to be sad during the day, that wonderful things can and do happen on September 11th. That it's okay to fly somewhere, okay to complain about the cable bill or go shopping.
Now, it is
a day we stop for a moment (or maybe several), but it is also a reminder that we move on. In the midst of
tragedy we learned and grew (although how much can be debated) and our children
don’t know a different world. I can barely remember a world before September 11th.
Babies are born, couples are wed,
children go home to fight homework and play outside. In the back of our minds, we know that the day is a little quieter than most days, and we might tear up as we remember where we were on that day. But I know that each time the anniversary passes I am reminded of all the good that is still in our world, and that mindfulness, I hope, will lead the hard discussions I have coming with SL. We will never forget.
Comments