My 9/11 memoir
It is not setting that is important but the mind placed within it.
I have always been an east coast boy. Grew up in Rochester, thinking New York was the greatest state of them all. Never rode a horse, and I still like to think of them as the animals blown about traversing the Navajo nation and others like it way away out west.
I grew up with a mother, no father and a grandpa to take care of me. And when mother was busy working my grandfather would take me on trips in his blue-green Marquis. We went to Virginia and D.C to visit his cousins and mother, and to New Jersey to visit his sisters and to New York City – first Brooklyn Heights then Manhattan – to visit my mother’s sister.
Given its location and the times I spent in the big apple wandering behind my grandfather and aunt, New York City was the nucleus of my twelve-year-old world.
On September, 11, 2001 I sat as many twelve year olds do in a desk at my inner-city middle school. I hated that school but my mother would say, “You make out of circumstances what you can. It’s not where you are but who you are and how hard you work.”
I didn’t know where my aunt worked before that morning two planes flew like malice shot out of a trebuchet into her office building. My bright-eyed rosy-cheeked English teacher looked more sullen than usual beneath her blond bobbed hair when she pulled me aside and sent me to the principal’s office.
In that office sat dozens of kids just five minutes smarter than me. They looked at me somberly or didn’t look away from that gray T.V. at all.
I do not remember much of the time between 11 AM and 12 AM – only the scattered mindset of my family. We faltered. There was nothing to do but wait, yet I remember praying before I slept and I remember some thirty minutes later my mother shaking me awake to say, “It’s ok. She made it out.”
I remember wondering, however naïve it may sound, where all the stuff in those buildings would go. I thought of the office spaces and the stores and subways and the survivors. My aunt, she moved from the city to New Jersey and eventually out to Dublin, Ohio.
Like many who sprinted out onto Liberty St. that morning, she has mostly recovered, but still deals with mild PTSD. We don’t go to air shows anymore because the rumble and scent of an ignited engine releases paralytic reactions from within her. She refuses to watch documentaries on that day (though she now owns two).
But she still can’t wait for the Nets to move home. Her cell-phone number still begins with '917' and she even, occasionally, will sit down for a Yankees game.
When nuclei are forced together to create fusion, it can be devastating in much the way a plane can be flung into a building. Lives were bonded on Sept. 11 2001. Even through recession I argue we are stronger for the bonds we made on that day.
Though we live in a turbulent world I have grown over this past decade to realize my mother was right; I too claim it is not setting that is important, but the minds placed within it.
