nmah6455.xml

nmah6455.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2004-03-04

On September 11, 2001 I drove to my classes at the University of Minnesota completely unaware of what had happened, because I'd decided to listen to a CD that morning. When I arrived, my classmates were sitting in the hallway, speaking quietly and solemnly to one another, completely in shock. When they told me what had happened, I thought they were joking. The idea that anyone could or would possibly attack New York City was ludicrous to me. That was at about 8:30 in the morning, and the last anyone had heard was that one of the two towers had been hit. They still thought it was all just a horrible accident, and there were no tvs around for us to find out otherwise, until another of our classmates arrived. She had been glued to her television and then her radio; as a middle-aged woman from New York City she was far more personally involved in what was happening than any of us. She told us the towers had collapsed. No one wanted to believe her; we were so isolated from what was happening that we had no way of fully comprehending the magnitude of the events that were unfolding. At that moment, I remembered that my uncle was supposed to be at a meeting in the World Trade Center, requesting funding for a documentary he was trying to film. I raced to the pay phone and tried to reach my mother, but it wasn't until much later in the morning that I was finally able to get any information about my uncle: he'd cancelled his meeting at the last minute so he could take his daughter to school; she'd missed the bus. To this day, I don't know if she realizes just what a huge impact that one little detail had on her family; she was barely a teenager at the time, and relatively unaware of cause-and-effect relationships. The most eerie thing I remember her mother telling me, though, was very much related: she said that the hardest part of that entire nightmare of a day was the moment when she pulled up in front of her kids' school in Princeton, New Jersey, and saw all of the hundreds of kids whose parents hadn't shown up to pick up their kids. The chill she felt at the thought of all of those children who would never get to see their parents again... I could feel it creep into my own spine the moment she told me, and I began to cry for the first time that day. I had watched the footage again and again, but that one little image made the whole scenario real to me, and to this day it still brings tears to my eyes, and probably always will.

A few days before September 11th, my friend Chris was accepted into the Army. On that day, I was so terrified for him, I begged him not to go. He promised me that he would be careful and come home with "no holes" in him, and told me that this only made him prouder to be joining up. He kept his promise, even after a year in an airstrip just north of Baghdad he affectionately called "the sand pit."
My best friend's husband was in the Navy at the time, a chaplain's assistant on the Teddy Roosevelt, but because he'd broken his foot a few days before, he was allowed to delay his departure for a few weeks, just long enough to marry her...and get her pregnant! He was at sea until about two weeks before she gave birth to their beautiful baby girl; she was baptised on board the ship and now has her name engraved on the Roosevelt's ship's bell.

I think what should be remembered is the raw humanity that was exposed in all of us that day. I remember seeing footage of Rudy Giuliani without his toupee as he fled underground with his staff, and hearing the words he said that day and many days after, and thinking to myself: I never would have known just how utterly human that man really was and how much compassion he was capable of unless I'd seen his reaction to this horrific tragedy. We all spoke a little softer that day; we all felt a little more vulnerable, we all appreciated the simple things in life just a little bit more.

Aboout a week after September 11th, someone handed out American flags to everyone in our neighborhood. For the Fourth of July that year, I'd bought a baseball hat that simply said "U.S.A" on the front with the American flag beneath the letters, and "2001" on the back. Ever since Spetember 11th, I have appreciated the irony of the fact that that year, of all years, happened to be the first one when I'd bought a hat with an American flag on it for the 4th of July.