I remember sitting on the small step leading down into our family room and trying to understand. An old rabbit-eared TV radiated Tom Brokaw’s voice into our family room while mom sat at the nearby computer desk, slightly ashen.
“An airplane has crashed into the second tower.”
I held my lanky 15-year old legs into my chest and realized what had just happened. People had purposely flown planes into the World Trade Center. My fellow Americans were running, covered in grey dust.
I had heard the news hours before, at 6 a.m. from the old radio in my mom’s big blue suburban as we drove to early morning seminary. She was always listening to AM talk radio and they had pulled crazy half-truth jokes in the past, so I thought this was no different. Maybe?
Class buzzed with “what if” questions and real half truths that convinced me this was no AM radio joke.
“We are at war,” they said. Or, “It’s the Russians that did it.” Or my personal favorite, “I really don’t know why you are making such a big deal about this. You people are being so overly dramatic.”
We managed to squeeze in a couple minutes of class before the teacher broke down and turned on the corner TV. His normally cheerful eyes glossed over, revealing how much us Sophomores in high school really didn’t know. I left, going back to another day of home schooling.
Then, one of the towers buckled, faltered and crashed to the ground. People ran. I slipped into my walk-in closet and prayed. Hard. On that old TV, members of Congress sang “God Bless America”, a song that I can’t hear to this day without getting a lump in my throat.
For one brief moment, Americans felt one united feeling: shock.
The days and months that followed contained a surge of patriotism and front porches peppered with American Flags. You couldn’t pass a firefighter on the street without a feeling of reverence. It was Armageddon. Our world seemed to be crumbling. While thousands of lives ended, mine went on.
In 2007, I remember standing at the gaping pit that is now Ground Zero.
Even six years later, tons of twisted metal and soot lay beneath me. Strains of “Amazing Grace” came from a flute attached to a grisly old man in a pea-green trench coat as he sat huddled against the fence. Thick around me were the spirits from those bodies that might still lay mangled beneath the rubble. I have never been one to believe in ghosts or superstitions, but that feeling there was real, thick and palpable. Later that night, we went to dinner with my best friend’s sister – a New York native. As we sat in the old bagel shop, she said she couldn’t look up at the sky still and see an airplane without her heart beating faster, even to this day. At that little Brooklyn bagel shop, I could still see the pain she felt while watching people just like her run screaming from the Financial District on TV.
I remember looking into the eyes of a little two-year-old child on September 11th, 2002. Together, we watched the memorial services on TV.
There is no simple way to communicate the gravity of September 11th. He was one-year-old at the time that chaos came to America and all I could think was that he will never know what this day really means. Will he look at a firefighter with admiration and reverence? Will he think of the people running through the streets of New York as his fellow countrymen? How will his generation learn the true meaning of heroism, patriotism and unity? Will it take thousands of deaths to act as one nation, under God?
A more critical question is asked of us. Do we remember?
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