9/11: Two decades of memories
A personal look at the terrorist attacks and a day that we all remember
Certain events are etched in each generation’s memory, so much so that the mere mention of the day it occurred makes you instantly recall where you were when it happened. For my grandparents, it was Dec. 7, 1941. For my parents, it was Nov. 22, 1963. For my generation, we thought it would be the Challenger explosion.
Then, 15 years after the Challenger, came 9/11.
Twenty years ago today, I was in Chester, Pa., reporting my second feature story for American School Board Journal, the magazine where I had started to work that March. Chester, the lowest performing system in Pennsylvania, was being touted as a grand experiment in public education. With the support of Gov. Tom Ridge, it was about to become the first district to be turned over to a private company — Edison Schools.
I drove up to Chester, about 2½ hours from where we lived, on Sept. 10. I stopped by one school and talked to a principal, hired from the nearby Philadelphia district. Edison was making a bid for that district, too.
Textbooks weren’t ready. The teaching staff — most of whom worked under the former district — was not happy about the changeover, accompanied by its threats of longer workdays, and by-the-book monitoring.
After a few minutes of walking around, I stopped by the central office and talked to the officials I would meet the next morning. The start of every school year is chaotic and yet full of promise, but as the Edison staff worked into the night, chaos seemed to prevail.
I stayed overnight at a hotel near the Philadelphia airport and drove to Chester under the beautiful blue sky that was so prevalent that morning. After a ceremony with state officials present, my walking tour of the schools began.
Within two hours, our lives had changed forever.
In the summer of 2001, I had attended a conference in Manhattan for my new job. Jill came with me and brought Kate. It was only my second trip to the city, and we all went to see “The Music Man” revival. Jill had played Marian in the Theatre Guild of Rockingham County’s production several years before.
Little did we know then where life would take us.
On 9/11, Jill had just dropped Kate — then 4 — off at The Nest Academy in Lorton. We were living in a one-bedroom apartment in Alexandria, waiting to move into our house, and the twins were staying with Jill’s mom in North Carolina. Planning to fix breakfast and scour the Internet as she looked for a job, Jill became scared when she saw the news about the first tower, then terrified when the apartment building shook after a plane hit the Pentagon. She ran back to the van, leaving water heating on the stove, picked up Kate and drove straight to Greensboro.
I stayed at the Philadelphia airport, unable to get back to the Washington, D.C., area. The ride home the next day was eerily quiet because there were no planes in the sky.
My memories of 9/11 are fragmented and personal, not societal, and I have trouble separating the day from what has taken place since. But this is what I think about when the day gets brought up:
• Frantically trying to call my family on that day, and the relief that came when I reconnected with Jill by phone.
• The pledges of cooperation among our political leaders from both sides, and how that feeling that we were all in this together didn’t last.
• Riding my bike to the Pentagon and to Arlington Cemetery at 7:30 a.m. on the first anniversary of 9/11, pulled there by something but silent even then.
• Reading about and watching — with a mixture of insatiable curiosity and morbid fascination — the first season of “Rescue Me,” the Denis Leary show about the brave but damaged firefighters suffering from survivor’s guilt after making it through 9/11.
• Visiting Chester again on the fifth anniversary in 2006 to revisit the story and what went wrong.
• The death of my second “mom” — Fran — on the sixth anniversary of 9/11, just six weeks after my dad’s death.
• Taking my mother to the taping of the “Newsies” movie in honor of her 75th birthday on the 15th anniversary of 9/11.
Some memories are more vivid and realized than others. In 2009, we had just moved Ben to New York for “Ragtime,” which was being performed at the Neil Simon Theatre where we had seen “The Music Man” a few months before 9/11.
It was the eighth anniversary, and I was sitting in Chuck Vassallo’s office as he and the principal discussed the exact times to have moments of silent reflection. Soon after, I left the school and walked to a memorial service honoring those killed from the Engine 54 station down the street.
I remember the little boy standing quietly, dressed in his FDNY dress blues and hat, not saying a word. I remember how his mom held the boy — who likely was a baby when 9/11 occurred — tightly to her and how he turned to give her a hug when the ceremony ended.
That boy is probably in college now. The children born in the months before and after 9/11 have graduated from high school. This generation can point to any number of events in which they will never forget where they were. Many have taken place over the past year and a half.
I also think about the Newseum, which had an entire room devoted to coverage of 9/11. The gallery, which featured a wall of newspaper headlines, also included the damaged broadcast antenna from the top of one of the towers, a piece of the damaged Pentagon building, and the cameras and images of a journalist who was killed while covering the attack.
The gallery took my breath away. But, like so many fragments and promises that feel pure and are yet unkept, it wasn’t meant to last. The Newseum, swimming in debt because its $450 million building cost twice the original estimate, was forced to close in 2019 even though 10 million people visited during its 11-year history. It is now being gutted, just like so many newspapers and TV stations have been. Not a surprise given a world in which commentary has replaced facts as “news,” but sad nonetheless.
The 20th anniversary of 9/11 snuck up on me. I knew it was coming but didn’t realize it was today. I knew I wanted to capture my thoughts of that day and subsequent ones since, along with images, but both have been as fragmented as my memories. The gallery here is a sample of images related to that day.
Fragments and anecdotes. I guess, in some ways, that is fitting.