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Jennifer Lauck's avatar

Remembering: Where were you?

Where were you when it happened?

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Carolyn B's avatar

My dad still lives in the same house, on Durrett Street in the treelined hills of NW Portland. The floor in his living room is hardwood now.

It was carpet then, the off-white, eggshell color that white carpet turns to when it's been sat and walked and lived on long enough. Medium length, certainly not shag carpet, but not the short, balled-up stuff either. It came about halfway up my fingernails as I worked them into its soft fibers and stared at the screen where live video showed clouds of smoke billowing from the first of the towers. Black smoke against a perfect blue sky.

My older sister knelt by my side, one hand on the arm of the couch, one on the ground, frozen. Dad sat on the couch behind us murmuring into the phone. This is where we were when the second plane entered the frame and shot into the side of the second tower with a long sideways flash. An explosion. A slow understanding that filtered across the globe that this was not an accident.

A collapse.

A cloud across the sky that ate full city blocks in Manhattan.

Those same people that Patricia saw, all powered white, sprinting from the ash and rubble like fleeing animals, raced across my screen.

My fingers in the carpet began to tick as I counted. I can't remember what I counted. Maybe just numbers. Maybe just a way to remind myself that I was there, in a living room in Portland.

We watched all morning until Dad had to go to work. Then we listened to it on the radio in the car. We watched it in Mr. Lipson's math class and in Ms. Dickey's Homeroom and then in Mr. Bailey's Social Studies.

Like Skylark, I remember a sense of wonder and confusion, that I was being allowed to see it all unfold. If it had been a movie, would all these adults have thought it too much? But it was real. A threshold. A boundary crossed. I imagine no one knew exactly how to explain the inconceivable to a room full of children other than to let us see.

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