Monday, 11 September 2006
Beth: Five years ago
I had turned 21 less than a week prior. I was starting my junior year of college. I had a morning gym class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and although that was my only class on those days, the class schedule made me angry because it began at 8:35 a.m. and I couldn't sleep in on what would otherwise be my day off.
I dragged myself out of bed on that too-bright sunny morning, with just in time to throw on an old, blue, USA t-shirt and pants before leaving for class. There was no point in taking a shower if I was just going to get all sweaty again in 20 minutes.
My class, a semester full of learning about children's gym games, began right on time. For an hour, we played with hula hoops and brightly-colored parachutes, holed up in our own, fun little world in the Fieldhouse while those now too-familiar scenes began playing out on televisions across the nation.
Even after class, as I walked back to the campus apartments - on the complete opposite side of the the campus and across the Beltline - everything was fine in my oblivious mind. If people I passed on the paths looked stunned or worried, I didn't notice it.
It wasn't until I encountered Jeremy outside our apartment building that I knew anything was wrong. He said something about planes and New York. I went straight to Christian's apartment instead of my own and joined the residents of Delta Six in front of their TV. A tower had collapsed. Another was on fire. The Pentagon was collapsing. So was my ability to form complete sentences.
Within ten minutes of gluing my eyes to the television, the second tower was reduced to rubble. I resigned myself to a day stuck in front of the TV. At the same time, a small part of my brain worried that I wouldn't be able to take a shower that day, and that I'd stink. It's incredibly odd what sort of things your mind will fixate on when real life becomes more than you can comprehend.
***
Today...
It was odd to be somewhat suspended in between producing media to impact others on this day, and being impacted by the reports and images that I had access to.
Looking at the images on the AP wire, there's no way that any newspaper could have covered the scope and magnitude of the memorials and suffering that occurred today. I myself was probably the most moved by CNN's access to their broadcasts that aired five years ago. It was rather surreal to watch the exact same images that I had been watching as the realization of the attacks slowly dawned on me. It brought me back, better than memory alone, to that day in Delta Six, in my blue USA t-shirt.
At the same time, I interviewed a middle school teacher today about what her class of seventh-graders was doing to mark the day. These twelve-year-olds were just starting the second grade on this day five years ago. The teacher said her goal was to do something especially memorable and patriotic with this class, because they are probably the last seventh-grade class she'll have that actually remembers that day. Even with this class, she said, the memories are fuzzy for some of them. From now on, September 11 will become just another entry in the history books for these children.
It's so strange to know exactly what, from now on, will be known as the "Kennedy assassination moment" of my generation.
What other people had to say
Add your own comments
Add style and hyperlinks to your comments
<a href="www.link.com">link text</a>
Makes a hyperlink to another page; text goes here is what the person reading your comment sees, while http://www.link.com is where the link goes.
<strong>text</strong>
Makes 'text' bold.
<em>text</em>
Makes 'text' italics.