Half-mast at the Washington Monument. Photo by María Helena Carey
Eleven years ago, it was a Tuesday, just like today. On the television screen it looked like one of those glorious September mornings, cerulean sky and bright sun emerging, just like today’s.
A Tuesday morning like many before, and so many after.
Eleven years ago, my first recollection was that of the morning radio show from San Francisco that woke me up every morning.
But that morning, something was not quite right: it’s easy to disregard human voices and continue leisurely sleeping, or at least trying to do so. Invariably, in my case, my thoughts would always turn to lesson plans and the mischief that my cadre of 15-year-olds would be up to on this particular Tuesday morning.
However, some statements are hard to ignore:
“It seems a plane has flown into the World Trade Center.”
“The plane was hijacked.”
“They are circling the New York airspace”
Believe it or not, my sleep-addled West Coast mind didn’t fully register the horror of this.
I thought it was a tasteless prank and took a shower instead of running to a TV right away. I thought maybe it was a tiny plane. I thought it couldn’t possibly be anything but a tasteless prank.
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In the shower, I kept thinking about what bits I’d heard and started to accept that maybe it was something serious. My shower was cut short. I would tell my parents to turn on the TV, and apologize for the early hour, but then I realized my stepbrother had already called from Texas to wake them up. The TV was on already. It was serious. I saw the scariest scenes anyone has ever seen on television:
“The building is on fire.”
“We don’t know what’s going on.”
“The towers might collapse.”
While I was in the shower, the Pentagon had been hit too. And while I drove to work, those brave passengers sank the last plane into rural Pennsylvania.
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Driving to work, I just couldn’t shake off the feeling that it could still be a prank; something having to do with people not realizing that you couldn’t fly planes into buildings. Something about a misunderstanding, and how you just can’t kill people who are going off to work on a beautiful Tuesday morning –even if my own Tuesday morning, 2000 miles away, was foggy and gray.
You can’t kill people who are just going off to work. Work is bad enough.
You can’t just kill people in their offices or their coffee stands or their receptionists’ desks or in their firemen’s boots or their pilots’ shoes– doing what they have to do. They are just doing what they have to do.
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At my old place of employ, we teachers had a communal morning prep which was spent honestly freaking out and asking questions like, “How will we tell this to 1500 teenagers?” and “How will we deal with this ourselves?” and “Does anyone have an extra TV set in their room?”
And later, “Does anyone know how to fashion a makeshift antenna?” Answer: With a paper clip and a very resourceful student. Thank you wherever you are, Justin.
Some teachers taught their lessons and forbade any network intrusion. Maybe they had the right idea that day.
But for me, I couldn’t not watch. I felt like watching was helping bear up even the tiniest fraction of that enormous sorrow with all those who died or who lost their own. So we watched and we cried and we talked conspiracy.
And we watched on.
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CNN, FOX news, MSNBC, they were all brothers in despair. Did it matter that day what your political penchant was?
You know the answer.
All that mattered that day was that people were dying right before our very eyes; people who were just trying to go about their daily lives in the same way we were in that small high school in the middle of the artichoke fields.
We were just trying to work. Because good, hard, honest work is what makes this country great.
A little of all of us and our collective innoncence died that day, between the North Tower and the South Tower and the west Side of the Pentagon and the open field in Pennsylvania– so far away from us personally in that little place among the artichokes, two thousand miles and three hours in the past.
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Now I live close to that west wall– that west, smoldering wall of eleven years ago which is smoldering no more. That wall which looks silently over the living river of highways and which was rebuilt but which will forever bear a scar.
Because the scar is there, in all of us.
Eleven years ago we said we’d never forget. Things have happened since then– lies, setbacks, confusion, but also healing, rebuilding, and a dead Osama.
But the deaths of 2,973 people –caused by those other 19 who also died there– cannot and should not be forgotten.
As if we could.
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A version of this post was published on my personal blog on September 11th, 2006..