September 11, 2001.
I was at school teaching. Meg, then 16, was in high school. Jenny was just 3, and at home with her dad, while I was at work teaching art at the same school that my other two children- Peter and Becca- went to.
I remember crowding into the pre-K classroom with other teachers watching footage as the WTC was obliterated. It seemed unreal, and honestly I don’t think I processed it.
The uncertainty continued with the anthrax scare. Five people died because of that.
This was the thing. Now we speak about the attack on the World Trade Center, and on the Pentagon- of a striking out against globalism, the United States, and the Bush regime. Then, we did not have any sort of framing to put it into context. We didn’t know what was happening next- or even what was happening then. The information that we received was fraught with assumption and speculation, most of it contradictory.
Bush was not accurate on a lot of counts in this speech, and we know what was orchestrated after. But he was right about the feeling of chaos. We began closely watching the news, hesitating when planes went overhead, wondering if we should open mail- just because the deaths seemed so random.
We become acclimated to a certain amount of death around us. We know when we get married that one spouse will likely outlive the other. When we conceive a child, we pray and pray and pray that ours won’t be one of the small percentage in this country that doesn’t live to adulthood. But we can live with it. When it seems that the tables are tipping- that the statistics are moving in a different direction- the fear that death will strike your home is pervasive.
So that is what I remember the most. The day itself was strange and unsettling, and the only thought that I had was, “What will happen next? Should I pick up my daughter at high school? Should we be together?” It was after, when you were wondering if the plane overhead was being piloted by a copy-cat who wanted to cause more turmoil by flying it randomly into a school- that was when the nation was affected, I think.
It isn’t something that I like to remember.
