This Sunday will mark the 10th Anniversary of
the terrorist attacks that have come to simply be known as 9/11. Ten years. It
is hard for me to believe that so much time has passed. I remember that day as
if it were just yesterday, but I have to remind myself that while it made an
indelible mark on me, my children and the majority of my students were much too
young to really remember. My youngest was an almost 3 and a half year old and
my eldest nearing 6 and a half.
As an American and a native New Yorker, no one
has to remind me what day it is when September 11th comes around. Though I was
not in the city that fateful day, many people I care dearly about were and
lived through the horrors and utter confusion. Being so far away just
heightened my own terror and sense of helplessness.
I can tell you exactly where I was and what I
was doing when I saw the towers fall. Every generation has that defining
historical moment. For my father’s generation it was Pearl Harbor. He was
drinking a Coke at a local diner with his little brother and best friend. For
my mother it was the day John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. She was
watching television and ironing. Where was I when two airplanes far off course
made glass and twisted, smoking metal rain from the sky? I was doing the most mundane
of things. It was just another day. I was sitting at my kitchen table in
Andorra struggling to get the protective plastic wrap plastic around my 1st
grader’s new school books and listening to the first Harry Potter book on CD
when I got the call that changed everything.
New York is a city of millions, but even so, my connections to people
who lived and died that day were many. My father, a Republican party official,
was actually in Sarasota, Florida in the elementary classroom with the then President,
George W. Bush. Dad was the one who called me, his voice cracking over the phone
line, to ask me if I’d heard from my mother who he believed was meeting a friend
for a morning of post Labor Day shopping at a department store directly across from
the World Trade Center. My brother, Frank, was in NYC for a meeting on the 102nd
floor of Tower 1. A 38 minute delay at take-off from O’Hare airport in Chicago
caused him to be sitting in traffic in a taxi near the Towers at the moment of
impact rather than riding on an elevator on the way up to his meeting. A former
student of mine’s older sister found herself on one of the airplanes heading
back to California and Stanford University. A last minute decision to take an
earlier flight resulted in her missing not only her Senior year but every single year
after that. The void she's left in her family cannot be filled. A cell phone accidently left behind on the counter at the Krispy
Kreme donut shop in the basement of the Tower complex caused my best friend’s
favorite cousin to find herself downstairs in the lobby of the building rather
than sitting at her desk on the 104th floor where she worked for the financial
company, Cantor Fitzgerald, a company that lost 658 employees that one day.
Among those lost? My classmate. My friend. Christopher Todd Pittman. We were
both high school and university classmates from 9th grade straight through to
our college graduation. Just 2 weeks before 9/11 Todd was transferred from his
company’s Tokyo office back to the headquarters in New York City. My high
school dedicated a bench to him and started a scholarship fund. Eleven
firefighters from the firehouse closest to my house went up the stairs of the
the World Trade Center’s Tower 2 to never find their way back down.
It was a terrible day. Terrible things happen
all over the world. 2996 lives lost may not seem like much when you compare it with
the hundreds of thousands lost to famine, disease, war and natural disasters every year. Who
can forget the tsunamis in the Indian Ocean and Japan or the earthquake in Haiti?
But we must also not forget the lives lost on 9/11 - lives lost not due to indifference,
poverty or act of god but lost entirely because of hatred and rage. I know I will never
forget. It was my city. My backyard. My people.
Ten years later and the thought of that day
still makes my heart hurt and my lungs feel like I will never get enough air. I just hope this year the sun is shining on 9/11.
