Anniverary

Everyone who was there
Will remember
Where they were

I always forget how Sept. 11 pulls on my heartstrings. In the days leading up to the anniversary, I always think it’ll be the same as any other day. I’ll go to work, get some exercise; maybe I’ll eat pasta for dinner, or maybe a burrito. Intellectually, I know that it’s the anniversary, but it doesn’t seem any different from any other day.

And then I wake up that morning and turn on the radio. Inevitably, there’s a broadcast of the memorial service from Ground Zero.

“Oh, it’s September 11,” I think. Then I sit down to eat a banana and some cereal, and everything is fine until the radio goes silent. It’s always at 8:46 a.m., the exact moment when American Airlines flight 11 hit the north tower. And suddenly, I’m back in high school. I’m 16, and I’m a junior, being herded like a sheep with all my peers into the Gothic chapel our school used as an assembly hall. The Tiffany stained glass windows shown in the bright September air. The school year was less than a week old. As we shuffled into our pews there were whispers that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, but I didn’t believe it, there must be some other reason for this unplanned gathering.

Mr. Pearson, our usually affable and energetic headmaster, took the podium with a look of such consternation on his face that I knew something big was up. He told us, in very plain words, that an airliner had been crashed into the building, and that the government believed it was a terrorist act. He told us to go to our classes and to carry on with our day as if nothing unusual had happened. But something unusual had happened.

My thoughts immediately flew to my Mom. She worked across the street from the Trade Center. I walked through the complex’s enormous courtyard to get to her office from the 4 train stop on Fulton Street.

As soon as Mr. Pearson dismissed us I ran to the pay phone. All my peers had cell phones, but I thought it was cool to resist the trend. I dialed Mom’s office. No answer. A lump formed in my throat. I called her cell. No answer. My stomach twisted into a knot.

What if her building was next? Would she know to leave? Would she be able to leave? How could she get home, the subway was in the Trade Center! I called home, no answer there either. With trembling fingers, I dialed my Dad’s home office, and there was no answer. Taking a deep breath, and blinking back tears, I called Dad’s cell. Mercifully, he answered.

With a tremble in my voice, I asked if Mom was OK.

“Mom’s fine, she went with some co-workers to someone’s apartment in Stuyvesant Village,” Dad said. “She’s going to come home as soon as she can.” With a shudder of relief, I hung up the phone and slumped against the wall. I closed my eyes, but something was still wrong. I thought of my brother. He was 13, in eighth grade.

Would he know to all Dad’s cell? Would he be as scared as I had been? Maybe he wouldn’t be worried at all.

I thought of a time he and I had gotten separated from our parents on a ski slope. I was eleven or so, and I was a worried little kid. No, I was a panicked little kid. If we couldn’t find our parents, how would we get back to the hotel? How would we get back to Brooklyn? How would we eat? In that moment, I was ready to find a payphone to call our grandparents to come rescue us, even though they were in Florida and we were in Colorado. Eric remained cool through it all. He told me not to worry. Sure enough, we found our parents in short order and got on with our vacation.

No, this wasn’t like that, I decided, Mom could have been in real danger. Surely Eric would recognize that. Without even considering going to class, I took off to find him, searching all the likely places an eighth grader might be.

As I encountered my classmates in the halls, we all wore the same pallid expression. We were scared. We didn’t know what was going on, we didn’t know what was going to happen, and you could see the tower burning through the windows. Then the second plane hit. News traveled like a wave through the school. Then, the Pentagon was hit, the White House, the National Mall, the Washington Monument, the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower, Seattle’s Space Needle. Rumor supplanted truth and the knot in my stomach grew to watermelon size. I felt simultaneously like my bowels were going to release and my heart was going to stop. What if Brooklyn was next. Prospect Park seemed like a likely target. Hell, even our school seemed like a likely target, we were only a block from Borough Hall!

And still, I couldn’t find Eric.

Then the south tower collapsed. It fell straight down, but the radio said it could have tipped any way. What if it had tipped toward Mom’s building. Eric must be so scared!

And I was terrified. I wanted to go home and get into bed with the blankets over my head until the danger was gone. But first, I wanted to tell my brother that Mom was OK. I had to tell him, who else would? Nothing was as it had been, but Eric had to know that Mom was OK.

As I walked through the halls looking into empty classrooms, I started thinking about the last time the Towers were bombed, in 1993. I was 8. It was snowing. My Mom didn’t work on Fridays back then, so I wasn’t scared. I didn’t understand what had happened, or why we were sitting in the house watching the TV news when we could have been outside playing in the snow. I knew her office was across the street form the towers, but it didn’t seem like a big deal.

Then, a couple weeks later, we ran into a friend of Mom’s on the subway. She was a healthy looking woman breathing oxygen through a tube in her nose. I asked my Mom, in the way only an 8-year old can, why the woman had a tube in her nose. My Mom told me that she’d been in the Trade Center when it was bombed, that she’d been trapped in the dark, walking down an endless staircase, not sure if she’d make it to the bottom. Mom said the stairwell had filled with choking smoke, and some people ran down, pushing anyone else out of their way. The oxygen was helping Mom’s friend recover. Oh. I was still 8, but I sure understood the danger a little better.

What if the bombing hadn’t been on a Friday, Mom? What if you’d been at work? What if it was on a Tuesday?

Finally, I found Eric. He was with a school administrator, who had collected children whose parents worked in the towers. They were trying to contact Mom by phone, but of course, as I’d already discovered, the phones were dead. They hadn’t thought to try Dad’s cell. My brother, a jokester with a constant mischievous smile on his face, was near tears.

“Mom’s OK,” I said, now near tears my self. I think I hugged him, I sure hope I did.