This Day For Me…Ten Years Ago

When I was in high school, I loved wood shop class. I found something so comforting in the focus you had to have on the work you were doing. The attention to detail was not just a desirable quality, it was in fact a necessity when dealing with tools that could easily cause severe injury. I was often in my own little world in that class, completely cut off from everything going on outside of it. That was of course until the bell rang, and you had to head to 20th Century History.

However, one beautiful morning in September of 2001 provided a different kind of wake up call for me. My classmates and I were cleaning up our workspaces, getting ready for the bell to ring to go to our next class, when the metal shop teacher came into our class. He told my teacher to turn on the TV. And right before he left the room, he said “It’s horrible, just horrible!” Needless to say, my teacher turned on the TV and my classmates and I immediately knew why the other teacher said what he said. Both towers of the WTC had already been struck by the planes, but neither had fallen yet. We were transfixed, unable to process the magnitude of what we were seeing. Oddly enough, my first thought was to think about the 1993 bombing of the WTC by Osama bin Laden. I was only 7 years old at the time of that bombing, but in high school, I was a political junkie already and had read and heard about that bombing not that long before 9/11.

The class bell rung and we went to our next class, which for me was History. The teacher came in immediately and said “No class today, we’re just gonna watch the news.” She turned on the TV and we all sat and watched in astonishment the burning of the buildings, and news reports about the Pentagon being struck, and how the Capitol and White House were being evacuated as there were reports that some planes were unaccounted for in the air. While watching all of this, I realized that I wanted to know where my parents were. Both of them worked in NY. My mother worked in a high-rise in Midtown Manhattan and my father traveled all across the city and I didn’t know where he was going to be that day. I immediately asked my teacher if I could go to the office and try and call them on their cell phones. She said of course. I tried calling them on the office phone but no answer. As I walked through the hallway back to the classroom after I couldn’t get through after several attempts, I saw fellow students of mine sobbing uncontrollably. Many kids where I grew up had family that worked in NJ and NY, like me. The fear that another attack could happen at any moment and you had no idea where caused sheer panic.

Not long after I returned to my class did I have an administrator come in and say that my parents were at the school and they were taking me home. A sense of relief immediately came over me. I went to meet them and they obviously asked if I was ok. I said yes, and then I asked them how they managed to get out of the city. I had heard on the news that all bridges and tunnels were closed to car traffic. It turns out they never made it into the city. They left late for work that morning and my mother saw the 2nd plane hit the 2nd tower. As soon as that happened, they turned around in NJ and headed straight home to pick up me and my brother. Once I knew that my parents ok, I then started to think about the rest of my family and realized that two of my uncles are FDNY. I immediately asked my Dad if they were ok. He said he didn’t know, so we kept calling my grandmother and Aunt’s to check in and see where they were. Eventually we found out that both were ok, but they had lost a lot of friends and fellow firefighters. 343 of them to be precise.

In the days that followed, my family and I were glued to the TV, unable to pry ourselves from it. At the age of 15, I was thinking back on all of the times I had been to Manhattan and seen the WTC. I was especially thinking about the time my parents treated my brother and I to dinner at Windows on the World, which was the world famous restaurant at the top of one of the towers that we had been to only a few months prior.

I think I realized then that this was going to be one of the most formative events of my life. I am keenly aware of how formative it is for me now. I can barely remember what the world was like, what I was like before 9/11. My coming of age was in the past decade, when arguably everyone was still grieving and recovering from the events of that day. It’s a decade that has undoubtedly shaped who I am and who I wish to be in the decades to come. My only hope is that the future sees us learning the right lessons out of such tragedy. Lessons that teach us to know that the only real cure for inhumanity is greater humanity.