On September 8th, 2001, I had given a party at a church shelter for two of my sons, who had turned ten and three during that week. I remember, as if in slow motion, children jumping, laughing, tearing open presents; balloons floating into a clear blue sky. The world seems so joyful, the illusion of peace and coexistence seemed to permeate the fleeting moments.
After a visit to my mother-in-law on September 11, 2001, my three year old and I had made a quick run to the store. When we left about 8:50, I turned on the car radio as the news stations began announcing that a commercial airplane had hit one of the Twin Towers in New York. As we drove home on the interstate, news of the second plane striking the towers filled every radio station. When we arrived at home, I switched on the TV and watched with the world as replays of the crashes and subsequent attack on the Pentagon Building in Washington and the plane crash in Pennsylvania filled air waves across the country.
I thought back to those other times in history that we remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when a national tragedy occured. For my generation, those moments included hearing in 2nd grade of the assination of President Kennedy, and in junior high, of the assination of his brother, Robert Kennedy. Earlier in the same year, we were shocked by the tragic murder of Martin Luther King. It seemed our innocence was shattered time after time.
For my parents generation, the attack on Pearl Harbor brough about the realization that the war their parents had held in the same regard, World War I, was not going to be the “War to End all Wars” as so many had hoped. The realization of yet another World War loomed heavily on the youth of that day. It seems each generation is somehow shocked into the reality of the cruelty found in human nature by these events.
On this particular day in 2001, mothers called daughters at work. Frightened parents rushed to pick up their children from daycare or schools. Silent fathers greeted teenaged sons with a hug as they returned from their job at the end of the day. Empty skies loomed eerily overhead as families watched the news together. Children were tucked in especially tightly, prayers came from lips that had not uttered them out loud in years. The world had changed, and we were only beginning to comprehend the enormity of that days events.
That evening, I got a call from a cousin, who was a teacher at a middle school only blocks from the Pentagon. They had been on the playground as the plane sped, loud and low, overhead. As the sharp boom of the plane crashing into the Pentagon was heard, alarms began to ring and announcements came over loudspeakers warning everyone to take cover. It seemed that each of us knew someone with a connection to the people and places which took the brunt of the terrorist attacks. Since that day, my life has changed completely, not only because of 9-11, but because my world, in the following years, collapsed around me.
Words from a 1969 song by Simon and Garfunkel still echo through my head as I remember their soft, consoling voices singing; ” Time it was and what a time it was, a time of innocence, a time of confidences. Long ago it must be, I have a photograph, preserve the memories. They’re all that’s left you.” So prophetic. I saw the news reports of the events at Ground Zero on September 11, 2011 and listened again as songs put into words what many of us were unable to voice. I heard another Simon and Garfunkel song, “The Sound of Silence”, a James Taylor tune, “Close you’re Eyes”, the new anthem to 9-11 by Alan Jackson called “That September Day”. We all shed a tear as children who had a parent die in the attack memorialized them. Another moment is frozen in time.
Still today, our country looses its young people to false teachings that took root in a foreign land, just as we have in generations before. There are still places where even children are indoctrinated with a philosophy of hatred, prejudice and fear. Unlike American children, they have never known even the possibility of a world where life was valued and values had substance. Life, for my family, changed forever, not so much because of the events of 9-11, but as evidence of the uncertainty of life itself.
In 2006, days after witnessing his brother’s sudden death, my youngest son spoke to me about his future. Excitedly, he ran up to me and said, “Mom, when I grow up-” then bowed his head and whispered, “IF I grow up-” and without continuing, walked away. Though his tragedy was personal. I realized that many of us, on that fateful day in 2001, changed our once hopeful “When” to a more pessimistic “If”. As I look, today, at those same blue skies, I know the world had changed, not just for me, but for all of us.