Remembering 9/11

There was a noticably quiet air about work today. I think grieving means that we shift between living our normal life and flashing to memories that unplug holes in our grief. After 7 years my life has been consumed by other griefs but just a few minutes ago I opened up cnn.com and watched their photographic retrospective of 9/11.
There are millions of stories like mine but I want to write it down, mark it, and encourage everyone to share not only their memories of that day but the ways in which it changed the way you think about life.

September 11, 2001 was my first day teaching. I was filling in for the spanish teacher and teaching in one of the basement classrooms (Mr. Dixon's old room). I had been at the school as a substitute teacher for a few days but this was my first actually in control of a classroom, in this case 7th graders. I taught the first period and then went upstairs to the library to hang out with the other teachers when someone turned on the TV. At first we thought the burning building was hit accidentally by a commercial jet. The french teacher called her husband on the phone. He was in the other tower and screamed at him until he hung up and left the building. He kept insisting that it was the other tower but finally relented and went downstairs. This may be the first ever recorded life saved through nagging.

The planes feel like they fly really low over the city so that seemed plausible and then while we were watching another plane, that looked teeny tiny on the screen flew into the second tower. It looked like a Cessna or some other small private plane and we thought that it had flown into the building as it was trying to help people.

It never occured to me what was going on nor did I remember that my dad was supposed to be in downtown brooklyn, right across the water and my mom was supposed to be at the Wintergarden, across the street.

I went to my next class and the kids had a sense that something was happening. Anyone who had a parent who worked in lower manhattan was pulled out of class and picked up by a parent and while neither the kids nor I knew the extent of what had happened, it felt like it made a much bigger impact on our small school.

I could hear the screams from down the hall. The administrators were slipping the teachers slips of paper to read. When I got mine I read it to the class and they didn't really know what to do. I'm not sure what happened after than but we kept the classes running through the next few periods.

At lunch, I walked into the teachers' lounge and heard "I can't believe they came down". I had no idea that the buildings had fallen though I had a sense that they were probably burned to a crisp. I couldn't really imagine buildings just being gone.

At some point, I realized that my parents were both around there. My mom hadn't gone in and my dad was alright hunkered down in a hotel room with a cooler of beer, all the food he could buy at the 711, and a ton of his workmen. They were laying low until the smoke cleared and then would wind they way home through Long Island and Rockland County.

Like most people I sat in silence searching for any piece of news I could find. I went home and my step-mom and I freaked out when a plane roared overhear because we thought it must be another attack. It was mostly speculation and stories but I still couldn't believe that the buildings were gone. I drove up to the lookout point in Ridgewood and saw the smoke for myself.

For me the biggest impact was in the coming weeks. While it has initially seemed like a lot of kids would be affected, the final numbers were much smaller. Three kids lost a parent and I, being a staff member that floated a lot, we assigned to watch the youngest and moniter him for any signs of distress. The kid never missed a day of school, never said a word about it, and acted as if nothing happened.

Now that I've lost my dad I get that but at the time it totally weirded me out.