Remembering

Jason woke me up that morning, startling me. I had been sleeping hard—in the only way one who has stayed up too late studying for a big test can sleep. It was my final semester of undergrad.

“Sarah, get up! They’ve bombed the World Trade Center again. It’s all over the news.”

I arose, slowly. Then I realized what he had said, and hurried down the hall to the living room to see the images on TV. J was pouring us coffee in the kitchen, but I could I could see the look of concern on his face. K was 4, sitting in front of the TV, eating pop-tarts. Usually, he would watch some cartoons before pre-school. This time, cartoons had been supplanted by the Today show.

I saw the small streams of smoke rising out of one of the towers (I didn’t know the difference between the North Tower and the South Tower at this time. If you didn’t live in New York, should you really be expected to in that moment?). J and I started speaking nervously, in low tones that K could not hear in the adjacent room.

What was going on? Had someone taken responsibility for it yet? Was it really a bomb? Did the news just say that there was a chance a small plane had run into the building?

“Momma?”

I didn’t hear him at first—I was busy finishing some silly sentence or another with J in the kitchen, sipping coffee and speculating.

“MOMMA? Momma, why did that plane just run into the building?”

K had been paying more attention to the TV than we had given him credit for. The Today show, by that time, had moved to the roof for their broadcast, watching the trail of smoke lifting into the freakishly blue sky, speculating just as hard as we were in our kitchen half a country away. Kyle had been watching as the airliner hit the second tower in the background of their newscast.

My son saw the act as it happened. Right in that moment. I will never forget the feeling of not knowing how to explain a horrific event—something that must be explained, and explained correctly, and explained now—to my four year old son.

I hurried up and got around that morning; went to campus to take that test. J got himself around, and took K to preschool before heading to work (they were close together). The building where my class was held was one of the newest buildings on campus, held the media and student radio lab, and had TVs in the atrium on the first floor.

I was there, watching the TV with a good chunk of my classmates, when the towers fell. One person screamed, I think. Several of us cried.

Our professor sent us all home. I don’t think we ever made up that test.

I ran to J’s work to see if he had heard. The TV there was on, and that was where I saw the first footage of the Pentagon, and heard about the 4th plane.

That day was filled with so much emotional turbulence. There was gas run in our town, prices rose by 400%, the governor had to step in and freeze prices. Just remembering the day makes me relive some of those emotions—and I’m sure that I was not the only one who could not believe that something had happened on this scale.

I had seen the Oklahoma City bombing on TV as it was happening, and the after effects, in person. One mad man, with a case of extreme ‘luck’ in his success—I could comprehend that. Multiple planes, with dozens of people? An organized attack years in the making? A plane full of ordinary people willing to die to regain control of the plane?

That was too much.

Our world changed that day in a way that we are only beginning to comprehend. Our society is different. We each have different world views now.

We have people threatening to burn Qurans. We have people protesting a mosque. We have videos of individuals condemning the infidels. We have millions of recent war veterans. We have less privacy than we have ever had before.

We each have a different zeitgeist now. This, in my mind is to be expected—it cannot be avoided.

My personal goal is to not forget—not to continuously live through the fear, mind you—but to always remember what happened, and honor those who suffered from this horrible act.