Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource September 11 Digital Archive Stories Description An account of the resource This collection is the bulk of the archive, representing the reactions and experiences of thousands of individuals beginning in 2002. 911DA Story 911DA Story: Story Tell us about what you did, saw, or heard on September 11th. Feel free to write as much or as little as you like. Tell us your story: It was difficult to write about this event until a friend in Minnesota sent me a holiday card, in which she wondered how she could explain this to her daughter when she could not understand it herself: In Response to Caroline Rose (Draft 3.5) I am not sure how you can explain it, not even to an eleven-year old at the top of her form. We have had months to think about it, ask, ?Where were you?? without the rest of the question, talk it through. I was about to leave my apartment to vote, then to work, five blocks east of the World Trade Center. The man on the radio said to turn on the television. I saw the second point of impact the way you did, and thought, ?I will vote, then find out if the trains are running, to go to work.? After I voted, in the Senior Center, I stopped by the television room there. A man said he had an appointment, at eleven o?clock, at the World Trade Center. A woman said the appointment might still be kept if it was on a lower floor. It was on the seventy-eighth floor. She responded that it might be cancelled. My neighbor exited the subway at Twenty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue. She looked up to see an enormous fire, then went to work. The trains stopped running; it took her more than two hours to walk home. When the bridges and tunnels were closed, there was an enormous rush to gather supplies. In the market, a little boy asked his mother why she was buying so much food, and what could she answer? They were running low. There was a television on at the bank. We stopped mid-transactions to watch the building fall. Over the next weeks, we were numb, we were small-town quiet, we spent a lot of time talking. I was running errands downtown and passed a site about which I had wondered. It was a cemetery, stuck mid-block; 200 years ago, it was in the country. A woman I had never met struck up a conversation. This often happens here. We enjoyed that the cemetery was established by a man named Preserved Fish. I found out more about her than necessary: what she pays for her apartment, that she has kids. This often happens, as well, but as we parted, she offered me a hug, and what could I do? I hugged her back. This was new. One of the candidates for public office had his headquarters on the street where I live. It is a neighborhood commercial street with an all-night diner, cleaners, Swatch shop, kosher Chinese restaurant, that Gray?s Papaya you have seen in many movies at the corner. He stuck an ironing board outside his storefront, plopped on it a small colour television, and placed in front of that rainbow-coloured folding chairs, right in the middle of the sidewalk. For the whole first week, people gathered, talking it through. The posters went up right away, all over the City, memorials to individuals were stuck in street tree pits, candles lined the sidewalks, rememberances from many places were everywhere. They filled Union Square, since its construction, a park where peace marches assembled, and still do. The posters were heart-wrenching, hand-made and copied quickly: one man was last seen wearing a purple polo and black jeans, one woman was the pastry chef at Windows on the World, several had tattoos of a rose or a cross or a dragon, many had children. A lot of detail was crammed onto letter-sized paper until we knew these people, whether we really did or not. They worked at the top, trading bonds, or at the bottom, in the elevator pits, and the names were from every country in the world. They were from every place in the United States; the pastry chef last worked in a restaurant in San Francisco, where my sister now works as the pastry chef. Over time, things stabilized. Everyone returned to work, but not everything returned to normal. That first day back, I came out of the subway and turned to look west down Fulton Street. There was a gap where buildings had been. At night, it was brilliantly-lit, so that the remains and the cranes were without shadow. The smell was incredible, unforgettable when we dared to think about what we were smelling, and it was heavy. The streets downtown got cleaned twice a day, and still do. In these months, we have absorbed it, somehow, until something small shocks us again: I pulled my money from that bank branch five times last month, twice to buy theatre tickets from the booth in Two. I knew that man in graduate school; he was from Australia. I cannot get to New Jersey by train from downtown. There is no FM National Public Radio. Sometimes, it is a bigger shock: A woman I know will not shop in stores where clerks are Arab. The clerk in the newsstand in the apartment house next door might be Arab. He was looking glum, so I struck up a conversation, as often happens here. He lost two friends who worked in the World Trade Center, and another was in the hospital, badly hurt. I felt with him. A man I know does not mind if his telephone is tapped. Racial profiling has resumed. I doubled my donation to the American Civil Liberties Union. How would I explain it to an eleven-year old? These people were jealous of people in the United States. Even living here, they did not understand life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. They did not see that disparate cultures can agree to differ and that people across a vast land can function as one society and survive (even) themselves. A few years ago, in a hostel in Switzerland, I was asked why I like being a citizen of the United States. I liked it, in part, because anywhere in the world, I could say, ?The President of the United States is an idiot,? which he was, and I would not be arrested. What response could there be? I do not recall one. In part, I could not imagine my home being anywhere but the City of New York, the Capital of the World. You can ask an eleven-year old to keep her mind aware and her heart open, and to work so that anyone in the United States can always speak her mind anywhere. We got all the cards, the presents, the phone calls to talk it through. Thank you. Heidi B. Andersson/s 22 December 2001 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource story592.xml 911DA Item Elements describing a September 11 Digital Archive item. Status The process status of this item. approved Consent Whether September 11 Digital Archive has permission to possess this item. full Posting Whether the contributor gave permission to post this item. yes Copyright Whether the contributor holds copyright to this item. yes Source The source of this item. born-digital Media Type The media type of this item. story Created by Author Whether the author created this item. yes Described by Author Whether the description of this item was submitted by the author. no Date Entered The date this item was entered into the archive. 2002-05-13 IP Address The IP address of the device used to submit the item. 167.153.4.76