Eleven
It was the longest bus ride home of my life. Some of the kids were quiet, but many of the others laughed, joked, and carried on as usual. Not much was on their minds, beyond what video games they were going to play when they got home, which TV shows they were going to watch, or who they were going to hang out with. I sat alone on the back bench, restless, staring out the window, searching for something familiar, anything that would tell me I was almost home. Though I tried, there was no reconciling what I had just seen and heard. My little universe no longer felt safe. But worst of all, I had no idea if I would ever see my dad again.
Ours is a world of incessant information overload. Every second of every day, there is an infinite stream of global current events, national, and local news, sports updates, political headlines, celebrity gossip, Facebook statuses, and the list goes on. So relentless is the barrage of data, that it becomes all to easy to become desensitized, detached, and indifferent. Inevitably, we tend to focus exclusively on the information that interests us. But there are rare moments in our age, when the eyes of literally every soul in the nation, are drawn to the exact same thing. I remember the last time such a phenomenon occurred. It was the day after my eleventh birthday.
We lived in Merrimack, New Hampshire, about 50 miles north of Boston, Massachusetts. It was a small New England town, with meandering roads surrounded by thick forest, peppered with quaint colonial homes; the quintessential childhood paradise. My friends and I used to embark on countless adventures into the woods, swamps, and meadows surrounding the neighborhood. There was even a golf course behind our house. There were times we would climb up the trees at the edges of the greens, and shout at the golfers just as they were about to putt. Needless to say, we had a volley of golf balls launched our way on more than one occasion. In the winter, when the course and the woods were all blanketed in deep snow, we would blaze a trail to the sand traps, where little ponds had formed and subsequently frozen over. We made up a game to see who could step out the furthest without breaking through the ice and soaking their boots. Back then, it felt like the entire world was in our backyard. Looking back on those days of innocent simplicity always brings a smile to my face; and waking up the morning after I turned eleven, it seemed like it was just another one of those days.
I remember getting ready, eating some grape jelly toast, and getting on the bus for school. I remember wondering if my father was going to be home this weekend for my official birthday party. At the time, my dad was working for an investment company in Boston, which involved a large amount of traveling across the country. He sometimes worked out of a nearby branch, but he also had an office in the city, to which he made long commutes from time to time. He would have two or three weeks of that, and then he would be on a plane again, flying out of Logan International. I often wished I could spend more time with him. I walked into my fifth-grade class and sat in my assigned seat amongst my peers, most of whom were already there. My bus usually ran a bit later. The teacher, her name escapes me, was writing something on the white board about fractions. I thought to myself, Fractions again? I hated fractions. To be honest, I don’t remember much else from that morning, but the hazy blur of my memory comes into sharp focus at one specific moment.
A boy, a year or two older than me, burst through the classroom door, out of breath, and interrupted the teacher. He said, “A plane just hit the Empire State Building.” And at that, he continued down the hall to the next class.
We all sat there, bewildered for a moment. What he said had little initial effect on me, and I remember feeling very confused. So what? A plane crashed into a skyscraper and this kid felt the need to rush down the hall spreading the news? Sure it sounded sad, yet it seemed so trivial. Crazy things happened every day, and I rarely troubled myself with any of them. What made this incident any different? But our curiosity had been sparked. So despite the hesitance of our teacher, a couple students joined forces hauling one of those old, bulky televisions to the front of the class, where they promptly turned it on and began looking for a news station. They didn’t have to look far.
The first image we saw was clearly not the Empire State Building. But it was New York. Two massive rectangular pillars. I recognized them but had no idea what they were called. Black smoke billowing upward from a gaping hole of twisted rock and metal. Raging fire. Silence. Someone turned up the volume on the television. They were saying it must have been an accident. A small plane, they said. The hole doesn’t look small. We sat, eyes transfixed on the screen. Some kid was asking the teacher, “How can that happen?”. She had no answer. She kept saying that we needed to get on with class, but didn’t move to turn off the television. The second or third time she urged us, it happened. We witnessed the second plane, Flight 175, crash into the South Tower of the World Trade Center on live television. Suddenly, it was clear to us. There is no way this was an accident. The teacher didn’t say anything about getting on with class after that.
In a matter of minutes, my carefree little universe was sundered. My perception of the world was, in an instant, radically altered. It was no longer in the woods, meadows and rivers of my backyard, full of bright optimism, adventure and excitement. In my young mind, it had become much bigger, darker, and far more sinister. I remember having seen images of political and social strife in distant lands when my dad would watch the evening news, but this was wholly different. This was my home. It might as well have happened right down the street from the school. But why? Why would anyone do this to us? Why would anyone in the world want to kill us? I wrestled with, yet could not reconcile these questions, and my child-like mind wouldn’t for some years; but I did basically grasp the idea that we were at war. The entire class must have been going through the same or similar thought processes. I recall then irrationally hoping that everyone was alright; that no one was hurt. Maybe everyone is okay and they can fix the buildings. It was several minutes later, that we saw little bits of debris falling from the upper floors of the towers. However, we soon came to an horrific and gruesome realization. They weren’t bits of debris. They were people, forced to choose between smoke and fire, or sky, and then falling to their deaths. I suddenly became very much aware of my fellow students, some softly crying, others wide-eyed, and motionless. The teacher quickly noticed as well and appropriately rushed to turn off the television. But before she could, I heard the newscaster saying something about the planes coming out of Boston, and then, my only thought was, Where is dad?.
They let us out early that day. I finally made it to our front door, fumbling with the latch. In the family room, the television was on, and my mother was sobbing. I immediately asked her, “Mom, where is dad?” She wasn’t listening. Just staring at the screen. It was then that I first saw the replayed footage of the towers collapsing, one after the other. Splintering rock and metal. Shards of shattering glass. Screams and running. An unyielding storm of shadow and dust surging through a narrow canyon of structure. Then it looked quiet. Darkness like night. People caked in a gray dust wandering through a haze of ash, while stray sheets of paper flutter their way to the ground. My child-like mind again would not process. What is happening? When I came to myself, I remembered; there was only one thing I wanted to know. “Mom, where is dad?”, I repeated. My voice was shaky.
She finally answered, “He flew to California yesterday.”
“Wasn’t he flying out this morning?”
“He changed his flight over the weekend to get to an earlier meeting.”
After a breath, I asked, “What plane was he gonna be on today?”
“Flight 11.”
“Was that one of the planes?”
After a pause, she spoke almost reverently, “Yes. It was.”
It was the longest bus ride home of my life. Some of the kids were quiet, but many of the others laughed, joked, and carried on as usual. Not much was on their minds, beyond what video games they were going to play when they got home, which TV shows they were going to watch, or who they were going to hang out with. I sat alone on the back bench, restless, staring out the window, searching for something familiar, anything that would tell me I was almost home. Though I tried, there was no reconciling what I had just seen and heard. My little universe no longer felt safe. But worst of all, I had no idea if I would ever see my dad again.
Ours is a world of incessant information overload. Every second of every day, there is an infinite stream of global current events, national, and local news, sports updates, political headlines, celebrity gossip, Facebook statuses, and the list goes on. So relentless is the barrage of data, that it becomes all to easy to become desensitized, detached, and indifferent. Inevitably, we tend to focus exclusively on the information that interests us. But there are rare moments in our age, when the eyes of literally every soul in the nation, are drawn to the exact same thing. I remember the last time such a phenomenon occurred. It was the day after my eleventh birthday.
We lived in Merrimack, New Hampshire, about 50 miles north of Boston, Massachusetts. It was a small New England town, with meandering roads surrounded by thick forest, peppered with quaint colonial homes; the quintessential childhood paradise. My friends and I used to embark on countless adventures into the woods, swamps, and meadows surrounding the neighborhood. There was even a golf course behind our house. There were times we would climb up the trees at the edges of the greens, and shout at the golfers just as they were about to putt. Needless to say, we had a volley of golf balls launched our way on more than one occasion. In the winter, when the course and the woods were all blanketed in deep snow, we would blaze a trail to the sand traps, where little ponds had formed and subsequently frozen over. We made up a game to see who could step out the furthest without breaking through the ice and soaking their boots. Back then, it felt like the entire world was in our backyard. Looking back on those days of innocent simplicity always brings a smile to my face; and waking up the morning after I turned eleven, it seemed like it was just another one of those days.
I remember getting ready, eating some grape jelly toast, and getting on the bus for school. I remember wondering if my father was going to be home this weekend for my official birthday party. At the time, my dad was working for an investment company in Boston, which involved a large amount of traveling across the country. He sometimes worked out of a nearby branch, but he also had an office in the city, to which he made long commutes from time to time. He would have two or three weeks of that, and then he would be on a plane again, flying out of Logan International. I often wished I could spend more time with him. I walked into my fifth-grade class and sat in my assigned seat amongst my peers, most of whom were already there. My bus usually ran a bit later. The teacher, her name escapes me, was writing something on the white board about fractions. I thought to myself, Fractions again? I hated fractions. To be honest, I don’t remember much else from that morning, but the hazy blur of my memory comes into sharp focus at one specific moment.
A boy, a year or two older than me, burst through the classroom door, out of breath, and interrupted the teacher. He said, “A plane just hit the Empire State Building.” And at that, he continued down the hall to the next class.
We all sat there, bewildered for a moment. What he said had little initial effect on me, and I remember feeling very confused. So what? A plane crashed into a skyscraper and this kid felt the need to rush down the hall spreading the news? Sure it sounded sad, yet it seemed so trivial. Crazy things happened every day, and I rarely troubled myself with any of them. What made this incident any different? But our curiosity had been sparked. So despite the hesitance of our teacher, a couple students joined forces hauling one of those old, bulky televisions to the front of the class, where they promptly turned it on and began looking for a news station. They didn’t have to look far.
The first image we saw was clearly not the Empire State Building. But it was New York. Two massive rectangular pillars. I recognized them but had no idea what they were called. Black smoke billowing upward from a gaping hole of twisted rock and metal. Raging fire. Silence. Someone turned up the volume on the television. They were saying it must have been an accident. A small plane, they said. The hole doesn’t look small. We sat, eyes transfixed on the screen. Some kid was asking the teacher, “How can that happen?”. She had no answer. She kept saying that we needed to get on with class, but didn’t move to turn off the television. The second or third time she urged us, it happened. We witnessed the second plane, Flight 175, crash into the South Tower of the World Trade Center on live television. Suddenly, it was clear to us. There is no way this was an accident. The teacher didn’t say anything about getting on with class after that.
In a matter of minutes, my carefree little universe was sundered. My perception of the world was, in an instant, radically altered. It was no longer in the woods, meadows and rivers of my backyard, full of bright optimism, adventure and excitement. In my young mind, it had become much bigger, darker, and far more sinister. I remember having seen images of political and social strife in distant lands when my dad would watch the evening news, but this was wholly different. This was my home. It might as well have happened right down the street from the school. But why? Why would anyone do this to us? Why would anyone in the world want to kill us? I wrestled with, yet could not reconcile these questions, and my child-like mind wouldn’t for some years; but I did basically grasp the idea that we were at war. The entire class must have been going through the same or similar thought processes. I recall then irrationally hoping that everyone was alright; that no one was hurt. Maybe everyone is okay and they can fix the buildings. It was several minutes later, that we saw little bits of debris falling from the upper floors of the towers. However, we soon came to an horrific and gruesome realization. They weren’t bits of debris. They were people, forced to choose between smoke and fire, or sky, and then falling to their deaths. I suddenly became very much aware of my fellow students, some softly crying, others wide-eyed, and motionless. The teacher quickly noticed as well and appropriately rushed to turn off the television. But before she could, I heard the newscaster saying something about the planes coming out of Boston, and then, my only thought was, Where is dad?.
They let us out early that day. I finally made it to our front door, fumbling with the latch. In the family room, the television was on, and my mother was sobbing. I immediately asked her, “Mom, where is dad?” She wasn’t listening. Just staring at the screen. It was then that I first saw the replayed footage of the towers collapsing, one after the other. Splintering rock and metal. Shards of shattering glass. Screams and running. An unyielding storm of shadow and dust surging through a narrow canyon of structure. Then it looked quiet. Darkness like night. People caked in a gray dust wandering through a haze of ash, while stray sheets of paper flutter their way to the ground. My child-like mind again would not process. What is happening? When I came to myself, I remembered; there was only one thing I wanted to know. “Mom, where is dad?”, I repeated. My voice was shaky.
She finally answered, “He flew to California yesterday.”
“Wasn’t he flying out this morning?”
“He changed his flight over the weekend to get to an earlier meeting.”
After a breath, I asked, “What plane was he gonna be on today?”
“Flight 11.”
“Was that one of the planes?”
After a pause, she spoke almost reverently, “Yes. It was.”