I was ten years old and in Mrs. Hedges fifth grade class. We knew something was wrong all day, but nobody told us anything. We had indoor recess. Two kids from my class were picked up early. We were dismissed for the bus in an unusually organized manner. And as I was making my unusually organized way from my classroom to the bus I ran into my father. And I thought “father dearest, whatever are you doing here, you are supposed to be at work.” Or something of that sort. He had come to pick up my sister and me, and he was surprised that we didn’t know, and he told us that a plane had hit the World Trade Center Towers in New York.
So I felt relieved. I had known something was wrong all day. I had been trying to figure out what was wrong all day. The best my fifth grade mind could come up with was something about a guy with a gun near my school. I had heard rumors about what was wrong all day. The best my fifth grade peers could come up with was a bomb scare at the Renaissance Center. To find out that whatever was wrong happened 635 miles away in a building I had never heard of was quite a relief. I felt guilty about that for some time, but I know that at the same time I did feel really bad (angry, sad, etc) for what happened in New York. So I’ve mostly gotten over feeling guilty about it. Relief might have been inappropriate, but I was ten.
That’s my September 11th story. Where I was, how I was feeling. And it just amazes me that there are people who are alive today who might not have their own. It’s not that the attack feels like yesterday. It’s just that it doesn’t feel like it was that long ago.
My grandmother’s 5th birthday was the seventh of December, 1941. That was a long time ago. She remembers when it happened. Not the details of the attack or what was on the radio, but the reactions of her family, and how they were listening to the radio, and how everybody put down every other thing that they were working on to learn about what had happened. And she knows how that day changed the world.
And I think that’s important to remember on the tenth anniversary of September 11th: Even those who didn’t know what was going on on this day in 2001, they know how people reacted. My ten year old self heard the words “plane” and “crash,” heard statistics and numbers, but didn’t know what any of it really meant. A five year old probably remembers his parents transfixed to the television, or people being worried. Those younger than that are likely to not remember anything. But in the past ten years, we – those who were really young on September 11th 2001 – have seen things. Among other things, we have seen airline security tighten, had a lot of education about what terrorism is, and watched as our government pays for a huge war. We may not have known or fully understood what was going on then, but September 11th is a as much a part of our lives as it is for those who knew things or who could begin to understand what it might mean for the future.
