Remembering 9/11

In honor of the ten year anniversary of September 11, as has become tradition, I am posting a piece I wrote shortly thereafter about where I was when the towers fell and our nation shook. Eleven years ago now - so hard to believe. Still hard to believe it happened, at all. May the memories of all those lost be a blessing; today's prayers are for them, and all the world.

September 11, 2001: A Tuesday. My junior year of college. My favorite class day, because the first three hours were spent in my creative writing workshop. 

We are sitting around the table that morning, all the students in my creative writing class. A table full of young writers, taught by a vibrant Southern author, Jill McCorkle, who tsk tsk tsks us whenever we use cheap clichés like "her eyes are filled with tears." She is tough, and we love her for it, because she makes us better. 

It’s a 9am class, and we are commenting on a classmates' story of new love -- a particularly challenging topic to tackle without using any clichés. Almost immediately after the class begins, a cell phone rings. This elicits an instantaneous tsk as our professor's eyebrows hit her hairline. This is unacceptable.

"All right, now, which one of y'all brought a cell phone to my classroom?"

We all turn innocent faces back to her. We know the rule. In honor of our beloved teacher, our cell phones are all off or absent. The phone keeps ringing.

“Oh good Lord, it’s mine,” she chuckles, reaching into her oversize knit bag. She's embarrassed. “It’s my husband – must be some sort of emergency. Please forgive me... honey, I’m in class, so this better be– what? Well, that’s strange. Huh. So... okay. All right – bye.”

She places her cell phone back in her purse, and reports with a puzzled face, “My husband says that a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. In New York.”

We are all mystified, all start buzzing: A small plane? Amateur pilot? Anyone hurt? Was it a navigational error, or some sort of mechanical failure? 

One student, saying her father works at the WTC, excuses herself to see if she can reach him. The rest of us return to our stories, confused but not yet realizing how shaken we should be.

The phone rings again. 

Flinching slightly, our professor takes out her cell, looks at the caller ID. “It’s my husband again. I can’t think why he’d need to call back – I won’t be a minute – I’ll just – hold on. Hello? Hi, sweetheart… what? … What? I… That’s just … okay. Okay. I love you too.”

She ends her call and somehow seems to meet all of our eyes at once. Her voice wavers like the watery air above a blistering fire. “A second plane flew into the World Trade Center. Into the other tower. They’re pretty sure they're... we’re ... we're under some sort of terrorist attack.”

Too stunned to speak, we stare. It never crossed our minds. Our naïveté had shielded us from the first crash, but the second plane went right through us.

Our teacher says, softly: “Well, y'all, I don’t believe there’s anything we can do just yet. Shall we stay in our story-worlds a little while longer?” 

It is not yet 9:30am on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. 

We mutely nod: yes. We want to live in our fiction just a little while longer. Please, let's just stay where we were.

But then our classmate, the one whose father worked near the WTC, walks back into the classroom, and her eyes are filled with tears.

© please do not reprint without permission of the author