9/11/01 - 11

Everyone says 9/11 is like the Kennedy Assassination.  Everyone remembers where they were, and who told them first.

Since 10 years ago was pre-blogging world for me, and I didn't keep a great journal at the time, I thought I'd write about it here so my kids know what I was doing that day.  Because, I do still remember some of the details as clearly as if I had seen them this morning.

10 years ago, I was starting my 4th year of teaching at Olympus high school?  Something like that.  I had just returned from Kenya with a favorite group of students.  Our flight there was very unmonitored.  We walked straight into the airport for an international flight without any real security check.  Parents brought their kids right to the gate and saw us off.  I remember boarding the flight home in Nairobi.  A Muslim woman boarded the flight with us in a full burqa.  You could only see her eyes and her heavy, billowing, black fabric covered her completely to the floor.  No one stopped her.  I actually remember thinking - that could be a guy with guns underneath the outer clothing and no one would know.  The thought only came to me because I have watched too many movies.  It didn't matter to me that she was dressed in Muslim clothing, it could have been any kind of clothing.  The point was that just that she was completely concealed under a huge piece of fabric and she could have been carrying ANYTHING under there.   As it turns out, she was simply a very orthodox Muslim woman who was flying to Amsterdam.  No biggie.

Fast forward to the second week of school.  I'm just setting up my classes, I have THE most annoying and incompetent student teacher assigned to me.  I start the morning with my favorite AP chemistry class.  A sweet, smart, blond boy (why can't I remember his name?! I remember his face, framed in the classroom door) comes in, just a hair under late, to AP chem and gasps out of breath "someone just hit the world trade center with a plane!"  I have no idea what this really means.  I'm thinking some little private 2 seater plane has lost its way and tragically ended by bumping into the world trade center.  I've seen that (those) building(s) in person and I'm pretty sure that plane vs. building = building wins.  I really don't think much of it, except we'll hear the details later on the news maybe.  My student was pretty animated though and thought it was much more.  I brushed it off in the interest of starting class.  In AP Chem, you can't lose 5 minutes of the year.  Every second counts.  Don't these kids get that?!   Some rich guy wrecked his plane... I just got back from Kenya, I have more perspective than that...

We plodded through the first period of the day.  Sometime during that period, or maybe the next, I walk into the library to make some copies.  Someone in there has the TV on and as I pass by, I see two burning towers with "debris" falling from the top.  As I would find out later, those were people jumping from the tops of the towers.  I'm momentarily disturbed and shocked.  I can't really process it in the 2 minutes I have in the library before someone burns down my lab next door, so I hurry back to class.  The next class comes in BEGGING me to turn on the TV.  I hear other classes doing the same thing, so I decide to follow suit for a few minutes.  More footage of the most unreal scene unfolding.  It was then I fully realized we were watching people die on live TV.   I decide that it shouldn't be up to me to allow impressionable and emotional kids to watch something so completely disturbing that I can't explain.  So, I opt to turn it off and go about business as usual.  My seriously annoying student teacher is all about living in the moment and thinks we should soak it all in.  I tell him to shut it.  I'm really wondering how we're going to get through the rest of the school day with this going on.  No one really knows what is happening, we just know it is B-A-D.

Soon after this, someone calls in a bomb threat to the school.  Lovely.  All the crazies are on the payroll today.  We evacuate the building and kids start calling parents on cell phones and as we sit on the lawn outside the school (for a very long time while bomb squads start rolling in), we get the real details of what is going on in New York.  It starts to turn into a pretty chaotic scene of hormonal, emotional high school kids trying to process such a huge event while at the same time feeling unsafe in their own school 2000 miles away from it.  Luckily, the principal decides to use his brain and actually sends everyone home for the day.  Of course, with the rest of the country, we all spend the rest of the night, the rest of the week glued to the TV watching the footage over and over in a stunned silence.  We can't believe that actually happened.

Fast forward 10 years.  My kids weren't even born when it happened.  Other kids I know were only toddlers and don't remember.  They have no idea why we have to be nearly stripped naked at the airport, take off our shoes, place our DVD players with disney videos in a separate tray, put our shampoo in miniature bottles, throw away our WATER, beg the security guard to please let us take the medicine and juice for the baby, leave the nail clippers at home, get to the airport 2 hours early, and say good-bye to the loved one dropping us off at the airport in the middle of traffic because they can only pause the car long enough to throw our bags out of the back of the car onto the sidewalk.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been going for Grace's entire life.  She has not lived on the Earth without those things, neither has Harriet.  What a world we live in.  Not that it was anywhere perfect before, but it has seriously changed, and tiny shampoo bottles at the airport are the very least of it.