5 years later

Five years earlier...

Unusually, I left my radio off on the way to school. I needed some peace and quiet. It was early in the school year and, typically, things weren't going smoothly yet. I didn't want to hear arguing talk radio hosts or silly news segments. I listened (and still listen) to the radio almost every morning on my way to school, but not five years ago.

I arrived around 7 in the morning. That's earlier than my usual time. I had copies to make, and if you want to make copies, you've got to arrive early. We only have 2 copy machines, and chances are that on any given day one of them is out of commission.

About half an hour later, two of my colleagues came up the stairs to the teachers lounge where I was putting together math packets and asked if I had heard the news. I hadn't. They told me, shocked, that two planes had been hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York. Back then, I don't think I really knew what the WTC was. But I implicitly knew they were tall buildings, and for some reason, my response was not one of surprise. I don't particularly remember the political climate at the time, but I said something like, "You knew they were going to do something like this. It was just a matter of time but you knew they were going to do something."

That whole day is something of a blur. My kids came into school having seen a lot of horrible things on TV already. Spanish language stations often have more graphic news coverage than our typical English stations. They had seen people jumping from the towers in desperation and hitting the ground. They had seen images of the towers smoking and burning.

I don't remember how or when I found out more details, but during recess and lunch I did my best to find out what was going on. At that time the news reports were still pretty vague. I knew very little. My concern at the time was to make sure my kids understood that they were safe at school. As we began to talk about what they had seen and heard, a few seemed to have apocalypic visions of war, of enemy armies flying down from helicopters onto our school grounds or of planes crashing into our campus. It was scary for me, so I can only imagine how it was for my group of 9 and 10 year olds, just a few weeks into the school year. I remember taking a minute or so of silence out of our community circle and asking the kids to send positive thoughts on to the people of New York. I don't think I even knew yet about the planes hitting the Pentagon or going down in Pennsylvania.

After school my co-worker's husband dropped by. I eagerly asked him for what he knew. The death count was wild speculation. Based on the number of people working in the towers, he thought that as many as 50,000 people could be dead.

Today, five years later, I gave my kids the opportunity to share any thoughts they had about it. This group doesn't really remember it. They were only five, half their lives ago. But still many expressed sympathy for all the kids who lost their moms and dads, grandpas and grandmas that day.

September 11, 2001, is a day I have not forgotten and I don't imagine I will. The catchphrase of the today seems to be "Never forget." I've heard and seen it a lot in tributes on the radio and the internet. It was on just about every cardboard sign on Monday Night Football. It seems a silly phrase to me.