Just memories...
Of course September 11, 2001 was a special day. It was Hannah's fifteenth birthday. It's not every day you turn fifteen. We were in a class. I don't remember what the exact purpose of the class was, but I know that once we finished our typing assignments (learning to format business letters, understanding appropriate greetings and fonts... that sort of thing) Mrs. O'Neill would let us play with Paws (a typing program). I wasn't the fastest typist in the class, but that wasn't because I was slow, it was because the class was an elective that only a few of us chose to take, and we were all high honor students that learned very quickly. We were fiercely competitive about Paws. 95 words per minute... 110 words per minute...
asdf
jkl;
Mrs. O'Neill was late to class, which was downright odd, but none of us thought much of it. We stood around talking, me, Hannah, Jona, Gracie, Sarah... I think Rachel might also have been in the class. I forget now. Some other girl was in the class for a while, but I think she transferred.
It was Hannah's birthday. We were giddy. Goofy. I'd just recently turned fourteen and the bulk of Hannah's and my conversations consisted of hypothesizing when we - two very skinny girls - were going to get our periods. Everybody else had already. We definitely didn't want to get it for the first time in the middle of a school day when we might bleed through our pants without realizing like one girl did in sixth grade. How humiliating would that be?
I was just started The Fellowship of the Ring. The Prologue was daunting. I was a Harry Potter afficianado. Harry Potter is eminently readable. Tolkien's Prologue with its incessant ramblings about the twelve names of pipeweed and the ancestors of characters I'd never heard of... I was reading it before classes started, because I wanted to read it before the movie came out and everybody started ruining the end for me. I was definitely the kid that swirled mindlessly in the computer chairs while reading before class started, rather than gossiping with my classmates.
But on September 11th, it was Hannah's birthday, and we were all standing around chattering when Mrs. O'Neill came in crying. She said that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. She said 'terrorists.' She brought us to the downstairs library (at that time there was the elementary library which had mostly encyclopedias and children's books and the high school library, which was upstairs, which had a lot more nonfiction, and had the computers, and had all the books about Salem and burning witches).
If my classmates knew what the World Trade Center was or did better than I did, it didn't matter. Somehow we all got the message that something horrible had just happened in New York City, and we all immediately started going through our mental lists of people we knew that would be directly affected by it. We're from New York. The City was our city.
In the downstairs library we watched as the second plane hit, frozen more by the news anchors' lack of poise than by the events. Reporters are cold and have perfect hair and makeup, and these people's voices were breaking, and they didn't know what was happening. We watched as cameras that were too close suddenly panicked and ran, the live feed still trained on the buildings that were suddenly collapsing down, shooting out smoke and flame and bodies as people ran as fast as they could, sometimes not fast enough.
We watched as people chose between being cooked alive on the 80th floor and jumping. We watched as their bodies fell.
We'd all stopped talking. We were watching people die. We were watching people scream and sob. It wasn't a movie, it wasn't a recording of something happening somewhere else, something that had already ended before we learned about it. We were a bunch of teenagers standing or sitting in a library designed for little kids, watching people's lives end in real time a couple hundred miles away. We were a bunch of teenagers realizing that our indestructible country had just been maimed. We were seeing terror in real time, watching people evacuate from buildings. Watching people try to run away and realize there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
I remember watching the towers fall, watching smoke billow like a volcanic eruption, watching people try to escape the inevitable.
I remember watching my indestructible teacher weep.
---
The teachers all knew. The students missed the memo. I walked around all day like a ghost, knowing Hannah's birthday was fucked forever. Instead of eating lunch with my classmates, I left the cafeteria early and sought out the rabbits. A country school with an agriculture program; we had rabbits. I pet them, and felt like something really important had just happened inside of me. I was numb, and I knew it wasn't entirely from the news I'd just seen happen.
I was incredibly pissed off at everybody my age that laughed and joked and didn't know or care that people had just died, that they were still dying, that right now fires were burning and bodies were charred and the Pentagon was broken. I knew that people on planes wouldn't be going home to their children. I knew that mothers or fathers waiting for their babies would have to wait forever.
And the only ones that seemed to care were my teachers.
I couldn't stand being around the students. I couldn't stand their ambivalence, their nonchalance. Mr. Ford, our middle school history teacher, had often said we were the most apathetic generation in world history. I'd disagreed before: we cared about a lot of things, they just weren't the same things our parents cared about.
On September 11th, I agreed with him. People my age didn't give a fuck.
---
Mom wasn't working that day, or she'd come home early. I don't remember which, but I know she was home when I got home from school. The news was on. Everywhere I'd gone all day the news had been on. The adrenaline had worn off. The news anchors had fixed their hair and makeup. Their eyes were still bloodshot and hollow. Now they were replaying everything, hypothesizing, repeating it over and over on every channel.
We went to the library in Oriskany Falls. My public library where I'd taken out books my whole life, where I'd been part of after school programs, where I entered coloring contests and requested movies that were Rated R and had to get my mom's permission first. They'd found a television. The news was on.
My stomach was a hollow spot somewhere below my ribs. I wasn't hungry. Everybody spoke in hushed voices. I was scared. People kept saying, "nuclear weapons."
---
My father watches the news, and listens to the news, and watches the history channel, and the military channel. He repeats himself, and watches the same programs. The news was never off in following weeks. Months. And he's half deaf from years of power tools and engines and banging and shouting. The news was on loudly. I fell asleep every night to orange alerts and red alerts and the sounds of screaming and reporters replaying the events, hypothesizing the next place that would be attacked.
One program, I don't remember which, or precisely when it was, had the people who'd been called by the passengers on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.
A woman with a baby... Her husband had called her. Quietly. So quietly.
He'd said there were men on the plane, they'd taken it over. They were in the cockpit. They were going to use the plane as a weapon.
The man told his wife he loved her.
He said, "We're going to do something."
That was the plane that crashed in a field, that killed only its passengers and no others.
I often fell asleep crying, wondering if I would ever be as brave as the passengers on that plane that embraced their deaths, that told their spouses they loved them and then ended their lives in an explosion in a lonely rural field. Martyrs.
I suddenly understood what it meant to be a martyr.
My classmates had all forgotten, or didn't care. Nobody talked about it, except the constant repetition of the news every night.
The magazines, the papers. The adults all talked about it in hushed tones, but nobody my age.
I don't remember what Hannah did for her birthday.
I just remember constant fear as I fell asleep at night that I'd wake up to explosions and burning buildings, or that, maybe worse, I'd never wake up.
asdf
jkl;
Mrs. O'Neill was late to class, which was downright odd, but none of us thought much of it. We stood around talking, me, Hannah, Jona, Gracie, Sarah... I think Rachel might also have been in the class. I forget now. Some other girl was in the class for a while, but I think she transferred.
It was Hannah's birthday. We were giddy. Goofy. I'd just recently turned fourteen and the bulk of Hannah's and my conversations consisted of hypothesizing when we - two very skinny girls - were going to get our periods. Everybody else had already. We definitely didn't want to get it for the first time in the middle of a school day when we might bleed through our pants without realizing like one girl did in sixth grade. How humiliating would that be?
I was just started The Fellowship of the Ring. The Prologue was daunting. I was a Harry Potter afficianado. Harry Potter is eminently readable. Tolkien's Prologue with its incessant ramblings about the twelve names of pipeweed and the ancestors of characters I'd never heard of... I was reading it before classes started, because I wanted to read it before the movie came out and everybody started ruining the end for me. I was definitely the kid that swirled mindlessly in the computer chairs while reading before class started, rather than gossiping with my classmates.
But on September 11th, it was Hannah's birthday, and we were all standing around chattering when Mrs. O'Neill came in crying. She said that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. She said 'terrorists.' She brought us to the downstairs library (at that time there was the elementary library which had mostly encyclopedias and children's books and the high school library, which was upstairs, which had a lot more nonfiction, and had the computers, and had all the books about Salem and burning witches).
If my classmates knew what the World Trade Center was or did better than I did, it didn't matter. Somehow we all got the message that something horrible had just happened in New York City, and we all immediately started going through our mental lists of people we knew that would be directly affected by it. We're from New York. The City was our city.
In the downstairs library we watched as the second plane hit, frozen more by the news anchors' lack of poise than by the events. Reporters are cold and have perfect hair and makeup, and these people's voices were breaking, and they didn't know what was happening. We watched as cameras that were too close suddenly panicked and ran, the live feed still trained on the buildings that were suddenly collapsing down, shooting out smoke and flame and bodies as people ran as fast as they could, sometimes not fast enough.
We watched as people chose between being cooked alive on the 80th floor and jumping. We watched as their bodies fell.
We'd all stopped talking. We were watching people die. We were watching people scream and sob. It wasn't a movie, it wasn't a recording of something happening somewhere else, something that had already ended before we learned about it. We were a bunch of teenagers standing or sitting in a library designed for little kids, watching people's lives end in real time a couple hundred miles away. We were a bunch of teenagers realizing that our indestructible country had just been maimed. We were seeing terror in real time, watching people evacuate from buildings. Watching people try to run away and realize there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
I remember watching the towers fall, watching smoke billow like a volcanic eruption, watching people try to escape the inevitable.
I remember watching my indestructible teacher weep.
---
The teachers all knew. The students missed the memo. I walked around all day like a ghost, knowing Hannah's birthday was fucked forever. Instead of eating lunch with my classmates, I left the cafeteria early and sought out the rabbits. A country school with an agriculture program; we had rabbits. I pet them, and felt like something really important had just happened inside of me. I was numb, and I knew it wasn't entirely from the news I'd just seen happen.
I was incredibly pissed off at everybody my age that laughed and joked and didn't know or care that people had just died, that they were still dying, that right now fires were burning and bodies were charred and the Pentagon was broken. I knew that people on planes wouldn't be going home to their children. I knew that mothers or fathers waiting for their babies would have to wait forever.
And the only ones that seemed to care were my teachers.
I couldn't stand being around the students. I couldn't stand their ambivalence, their nonchalance. Mr. Ford, our middle school history teacher, had often said we were the most apathetic generation in world history. I'd disagreed before: we cared about a lot of things, they just weren't the same things our parents cared about.
On September 11th, I agreed with him. People my age didn't give a fuck.
---
Mom wasn't working that day, or she'd come home early. I don't remember which, but I know she was home when I got home from school. The news was on. Everywhere I'd gone all day the news had been on. The adrenaline had worn off. The news anchors had fixed their hair and makeup. Their eyes were still bloodshot and hollow. Now they were replaying everything, hypothesizing, repeating it over and over on every channel.
We went to the library in Oriskany Falls. My public library where I'd taken out books my whole life, where I'd been part of after school programs, where I entered coloring contests and requested movies that were Rated R and had to get my mom's permission first. They'd found a television. The news was on.
My stomach was a hollow spot somewhere below my ribs. I wasn't hungry. Everybody spoke in hushed voices. I was scared. People kept saying, "nuclear weapons."
---
My father watches the news, and listens to the news, and watches the history channel, and the military channel. He repeats himself, and watches the same programs. The news was never off in following weeks. Months. And he's half deaf from years of power tools and engines and banging and shouting. The news was on loudly. I fell asleep every night to orange alerts and red alerts and the sounds of screaming and reporters replaying the events, hypothesizing the next place that would be attacked.
One program, I don't remember which, or precisely when it was, had the people who'd been called by the passengers on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.
A woman with a baby... Her husband had called her. Quietly. So quietly.
He'd said there were men on the plane, they'd taken it over. They were in the cockpit. They were going to use the plane as a weapon.
The man told his wife he loved her.
He said, "We're going to do something."
That was the plane that crashed in a field, that killed only its passengers and no others.
I often fell asleep crying, wondering if I would ever be as brave as the passengers on that plane that embraced their deaths, that told their spouses they loved them and then ended their lives in an explosion in a lonely rural field. Martyrs.
I suddenly understood what it meant to be a martyr.
My classmates had all forgotten, or didn't care. Nobody talked about it, except the constant repetition of the news every night.
The magazines, the papers. The adults all talked about it in hushed tones, but nobody my age.
I don't remember what Hannah did for her birthday.
I just remember constant fear as I fell asleep at night that I'd wake up to explosions and burning buildings, or that, maybe worse, I'd never wake up.