Where were you?
9-11 open mic for Flight School writers 🎤
Welcome Flight Schoolers. This day requires its own placeholder: 9-11 and the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. So, let’s do it.
First, a moment.
Head bowed.
Mind clear.
And a prayer…your own or mine…
…for the souls who lost their lives on that terrible day, the families who lost their beloveds, and the ongoing reverberations felt through our young nation—in cities and towns—for that evil act of violence. We are told “vengeance is mine,” and so must trust that a higher power knows the whole truth of that day and the players who pulled the strings and that that great power will bring about justice.
Until then, we remember.
Member, as defined in medical dictionaries, is a distinct body part or limb. To dis-member something would be to deprive, divide, or reduce….As it’s opposite, re-member means to put back together, to recall, or retain.
~ From The Powerful Truth of Remembering, by Lori Jackson
Remembering: Where Was I?
Twenty-two years ago, I was overblown pregnant with my second child. People would stop me on the sidewalk because they thought I was having twins.
“No,” I’d tell them. “Just a big one, it seems. A girl.”
I got the news when I was touring for Blackbird in Amsterdam. I’d stepped (waddled) into a florist to get a bouquet for my Dutch publisher when the shop owner, a grizzled older man wearing a fedora and a smock, hurried over and asked if I was an American.
Surrounded by roses, dahlias, sunflowers, bluebells, cosmos, and so many more, I looked at him for a long moment. What made me such a standout, I thought. Surely not the bulbous belly?
“I am,” I said.
His face softened, and he touched my elbow. “Your country has been attacked,” he said.
He steered me to the front of the store, where a small television sat on a narrow countertop. On the screen, the instant replay of the images of airplanes flying into the towers. Again and again, the powers-that-be rewound the tape and started that reel over. Towers standing. Towers gone. Towers standing. Towers gone.
The mind cannot grasp what it’s never seen before, but the instincts know precisely what to do. I held my stomach, protective of the new life within, and then hurried out of the store and back to my hotel.
“Are you guys okay?” I asked my husband, who lived three thousand miles from ground zero. But what did I know? By the time I had him on the phone, all manner of horrors had played in my mind.
“Yeah. Me and Spencer are fine,” he said, the sounds of the TV playing that same news I had just seen. “But you need to come home. Now.”
Your Turn
Remembering: Where were you?
Where were you when it happened?
Please feel free to leave your story in the comments.
~ J.
Remembering: Where were you?
Where were you when it happened?
Please feel free to leave your story in the comments.
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.