On September 11, 2001, two hijacked planes hurtled into the two World Trade Center towers in downtown Manhattan. It was an apparently coordinated suicide attack by al-Qaeda. An estimated 2,749 people were murdered that day.
All that is clear to me. They are the basic facts. But, when this happened, I was all the way in Los Angeles, just waking up to a normal school day. I was in the eighth grade.
Anything that happens when you’re 13 is less important than you are. And years later, even the most vivid memories always seem to glaze over with uncertain details and missing bits. The only memories I have from that day are as follows:
My parents called to wake me up for school. Our family had just added a second phone line to our house, one for the kids, one for the adults. A ringing phone was my alarm clock.
One parent (I can’t even remember which) said: “Good morning, it’s time to get up for school. Oh, and a plane just hit the World Trade Center.”
Fuzzy from sleep, that meant nothing to me. Even passing by the television to the kitchen for breakfast didn’t thrill me; I was 13. And I had never even known what those two towers were. I had only seen them in pictures.
After that, things blur again. I remember that our teachers weren’t allowed to show the news to us during school hours, and I remember the image of the smoking towers and the scrolling news lines. But that’s about it. The rest is lost in my 13-year-old mind.
Last week, when I went to the WTC site, I was drugged up, and not on purpose. I had been really sick during the previous days and was trying to clear my lungs by using Mucinex. But, of course, I’m one of those rare cases that experiences stronger-than-normal side effects with this particular drug and I was actually high. Lightheaded. Confused. Blurry eyed. And fuzzy.
So, even though I had an emotive voice narrating the whole event from start to finish, I could hardly concentrate. The $10 tour seems obscure and distant to me now. My notes from the day are scribbles of quotes and random details. I was tipsy! I could hardly walk straight! How was I supposed to take in the enormity of the tales and tragedies displayed before me?
All I know for sure is what anyone can see there right now: that the remains of 9/11 are a sad and unfortunate shadow of what used to tower triumphantly into the sky.
But I look at it another way. The remains are beautiful. And on a sunny day, you can see the beautiful reflection of the sun bouncing off the glass buildings surrounding the site, while cranes and rusty metal arch in front of them, indicating the rebuilding of a new monument, a new downtown, a new America and (we hope) a new world.
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Julie Doiron – Will You Still Love Me In . . .
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