Ten Years

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.