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My family was looking forward to a lot of things on the sunny Tuesday that was September 11, 2001. My husband was home because he had not yet started his new job at the World Trade Center; the company had asked to postpone his start date from the beginning of September to mid-month. So he was able to join me to walk our twin daughters to their second day of pre-K phase in at PS 58.
As we walked up Court Street, I saw sheets of paper floating down at us. I thought of the billets that had once been dropped from planes during wartime to warn the people about attack. Could these be some sort of advertisement? What a waste of resources. I thought I saw a page with a single Arabic letter. I know now that could not have been so.
As we got to the corner, a man passed us with a transistor radio. He said a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I assumed a small commuter plane had gone off track, and felt sorry for those on board. At the time I was not consciously connecting the papers with the plane.
We joined the other 53 children and families in the sweet, curtained pre-K rooms. We were expected to stay in the room with the children during phase in. Standing in a row with other parents, I felt the floor shake and heard a low rumble, as if a really big truck had hit a metal plate in the road on Smith Street. I remember turning to the parents on either side of me and seeing my own uneasy look reflected back.
I cannot accurately recollect the timeline of the following events:
I went outside with other parents into the hallway. I learned that a large plane, and then another, had flown into the Twin Towers. I smelled smoke. The principal told us to stay inside with the children, not to go home. A mom told me one tower had fallen. Fallen! We did not know what was in the air. The teachers went on as if nothing unusual was happening. But parents began to take children home. A mom arrived who had left her office and walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to get to school. There was no public transportation. There was no cell service. Soon we realized that we had to let Ms. C, the pre-K paraprofessional who stayed with us, go to her own family. We wet brown paper towels with water and walked home with them over our mouths and noses.
Outside the air was smoke and dust but you could see through it. I found whole sheets of office papers in my front garden. I had left our windows open when we left the house (I did not do that again for many years). I closed the windows as my husband took the girls to our neighbor’s house across the street to get the news on cable. We had an antenna but there was no signal coming from the Trade Center any longer. I was alone in the house when a jet flew low overhead. The sound sent me rushing into the street to my neighbor’s house. We all watched the news as the second tower fell. We learned that the Pentagon was hit, that another plane had crashed near Pittsburgh.
In the next days, we waited to hear news of my husband’s new company. Had their people made it out of the Tower? We could not reach them; their phones were gone. We were so grateful that he was not in the building that day, but did he have a job?
The girls went to school the next day. The staff created a safe environment and advised against watching the news with the kids. The school learned of family members who were lost. Teachers learned that some of their former students were gone as well. In the face of all of this, everyone tried to keep things as “normal” as possible. I don’t know how the teachers did that. Miraculously, we heard from my husband’s employer that all of his colleagues were safe.
Later, the children of Oklahoma City sent teddy bears to our pre-K children. (Many schools in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn received them.) Our children did not know about the bombings there, and did not really understand why they got the bears. But we did. I will never forget that gesture. It was then that I understood that the events of 9/11 did not just happen to New York, or Washington, or the incredible people of Flight 93, but to the whole nation.
Recently tourists asked me for directions to Ground Zero. I had to pause to think of where that could be. I always think of it as the World Trade Center.