Remembering 9/11

Today is beautiful...clear and cool...a perfect September day...just like it was on that Tuesday morning 10 years ago. The sky is a bright blue, just as I remember it being then.

On that fateful September morning, I was with my homeroom students...it was their first year at the high school and they were already nervous on this second week in a new school. Ironically, it was my job that morning to reassure them that the next four years were going to be fine...and safe.

My secretary interrupted our group with not one, but two, phone messages... "Call your Mom" and, right under it, "Husband, too". The time on the memo was 9:10 a.m., and the date...9/11.

My son was newly married in 2001, and his wife had just arrived from Japan to start a new life in America. They were living in New York City.  I saved the e-mail I sent to him as soon as my students were dismissed. In the subject line, with fingers trembling on the keyboard, I had written, "Oh My God!".

My son had been on a train when the subway was shut down and was stranded in Long Island. My new daughter-in-law watched the smoke rise from the towers from the roof of their apartment building in Brooklyn, right across the river from lower Manhattan.

The hour and a half of not knowing if they were OK was excruciating. But our family was lucky that day...not so for so many others.

Sometimes I wonder why we all need to tell our stories of this day, as those of us who remember the day President Kennedy died did...or as my parents needed to after Pearl Harbor. Maybe we share our memories of these events in an attempt to make some kind of communal sense of the unthinkable.

So this morning we hung a flag on the gate at Winn Farm...

remembered...

and prayed for those who were lost 10 years ago today.

"Imagine all the people, living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one."

-John Lennon