Reflections from Shattered Glass, Part 1

For whatever reason, images of September 11th have recently been pouring through my dreams. I don’t remember that day, it hides behind the fluidly concrete curtain of concussions, but I wrote about it enough at the time that I can tell my story...and feel the emotions again. The contrived memories are good enough keys to pick the locks of the real ones and I am fully confident that my understanding of my actions that day may be better than the average person around my age—for it was well recorded.

I put that caveat up first to let you know about the various biases on this post: I was three weeks away from finishing my 12th year alive at the time, but the story is being related through the various filters of then and now.

I was at a yearbook conference, specifically a lecture about how to balance good reporting of the school year and the production of a book that would cause fond memories years down the line. I feel, now, that that setting is what led me to react the way I did. Instead of the day that was about to happen being about the tragedy itself…to me it became more about what happened as a response to it. How my friends and school would respond, and even then I wondered how I would remember that day. (I obviously didn’t know at the time that my memories would later be snatched away from me)

They stopped the individual sessions and brought everyone at the conference into a main lecture hall. They told us to find our sponsors and they would advise us whether we were staying or going, an ominous message in of itself. We knew something was up, could see in on the adult faces in the room and the atmosphere was easy to read, even for a group of middle schoolers. I later found out that our sponsors had been told moments before we streamed noisily into the room and were asked to judge if we should find out there, at the conference, at school or elsewhere.

Our sponsor let us find out then. They told us, calmly, what had happened. I would say that 80% of the room (including myself, I am sad to admit) didn’t understand the scope of the situation. I would further say that 50% (thankfully I am not in this group) were not even sure what the Twin Towers were. I personally had been there before and had already planned a trip to go to New York to see them with a broker friend of the family that coming January. Obviously that trip did not play out. That, however, was not my first response. My first response was typical of my rank and file:

“Are we going to be evacuated further away from the NAS?” (The military base that, even at that age, I understood to be the pilot capital of the military world, and that would have to respond very carefully to the event)

My sponsor laughed. One of those, “Kids say the darndest things” smiles that spread painfully across adults faces when in incredibly emotional situations. No, the answer was no, we were outside the evacuation ring. But there was a ring, and the base was on as high of an alert as the Pentagon was, even more so since they already knew that the pilot that hit the first tower was trained at good 'ole NAS.

We watched some news and, while we were sitting there, the second tower was struck. Watching it live didn’t feel “live”. It felt so much like something out of my grandfather’s endless stories from the war...sad, but so distant that it was more a curiosity. I said later that day to my father “I wish we could watch the news in black and white, not color”. For whatever irony, it felt more real when it was in black and white. The color made it feel like a bad disaster movie.

At this point everyone’s parents start freaking out and calling our cell phones so we headed back to our school campus, 5 minutes down the road.

The first thing I did on campus? I lowered the flag to half mast.

The flag sat in the center of the courtyard where the campus gathers for announcement and by the roundabout where students are picked up and dropped off in the mornings and afternoons. The entire school was gathered in the area and I couldn’t believe they had not lowered the flag. I marched up to my social studies teacher (a truly incredibly person who I could write pages about. But in short, he was a retired career enlisted to officer marine who volunteered for search and rescue in the area and had such an incredible impact on my life and would continue to do so to this day) who silently handed me the key to the flag before I could explode. So he hadn’t forgot, he was waiting for me.

That was when I started to cry. That was when it finally caught up with me. I finally left the zone of “take care of things first” and slammed head first into “now you can feel what’s happening”. My marine-for-a-mentor had tear-stained lips as he bent down and hugged me and told me it was time for me to show everyone the symbol that had to hold us together. To show the too-quiet gathering of 300 students under the age of 14 that it okay to be sad, and mourn, but that the flag still flies above them.

I will fully admit that I had no comprehension of what sort of events would play out from the smoldering buildings, but I was starting to grasp what sort of event would play out that day, at school and back home.

We walked to the pole and in full performance lowered the gently fluttering flag. If this were a movie, the entire courtyard would have gone silent and stood up in respect. Someone would have started singing the national anthem or something else blazingly patriotic while the flag snapped horizontal in a sudden gust of wind. But nothing happened, people watched and continued talking or staring into mid-space just as they were when I walked up. A few teachers noticed the gently falling tears on mine and Mr. Shores faces and let a gentle smile come across their face.

They knew that, for both of us, lowering the flag was a way for both of us to try to start to comprehend, to heal. I know that now, I talked to them about it later. Years later.

Parents had already started coming and picking up their kids. Some for ridiculous reasons from “My child should not have been told without me there and I am taking him or her home in rebellion” to “How dare you teachers act like anything is wrong”. And others for incredibly daunting reasons...two in particular held my attention for the following hours instead of the news coming over the television. One, my best friend’s dad was in the towers that day. We would find out what felt like weeks later (it was only a day) that he was not one of the lucky ones, but he was among the brave ones whose actions allowed others to be lucky. Not that that was any comfort at the time, but it is now. Secondly, my friends whose parents were active duty or in reserves. They were being called in to report, already, within mere hours.

My own family would soon feel the waves from the event, but more as aftershocks instead of such poignant immediacy. So there I sat, in the beating Florida sun, watching my friends climb into cars and drive away from the emotional safety net of their un-knowing friends into a swarm of new, dangerously real-life experiences. I couldn’t sit with my remaining class mates; the ones whose parents either couldn’t or didn’t feel the need to tear away from their jobs to fetch them mid day. (My mom was at work at the hospital and my dad was a teacher at a different school, so I could partially understood their possible feelings of abandonment, I just didn’t share them) These were the kids that may or may not have understood what was going on, but lacked a tangible connection to the events, for the time being. Not to say they were uniform in their response, but I just couldn’t sit around and wait bleary eyed and restless beside them.

Like when I raised the flag, I needed to do something. I ran around and got food or drink for the emotionally fatiguing teachers (No, honey, we won’t be going to PE today, your mom is on her way. Joey will be fine, his dad is just worried. Everything will be okay. Ask your parents tonight to explain.) I played with the kids under 4th grade who were not informed of the situation but were being held in the courtyard anyway.

I climbed on a roof top and took pictures of the scene. What else could I do? I was torn—do I photograph these people, these children, who will remember this day with or without visual aid? Is the production of something tangible at this point disgusting or comforting? The answer to those questions depends on who you ask, but my principle was on the side of the fence who thought my adventures were disrespectful and inappropriate. The film was taken from my canister in a moment of lost composure with the incredulous shouts of “You are supposed to be one of the big kids here, helping, not causing problems.”

The pictures were never developed.

I was allowed to take pictures at the memorial assembly the next day, as the yearbook’s photographer, but I did so dispassionately. Not that I thought the memorial service wasn’t worth remembering, I just thought the production of support was the healing mechanism contrived by my principle who had just completely stomped all over mine. This may be a selfish response, but even now I look back and recognize that she was under incredible pressure and her reaction was out of too-long-bottled up emotions, but feel like I was denied my chance to heal using my own healing mechanisms.

A parent who witnessed the stealing of my film quickly offered to drive me to my father’s school. Wise parent; it is likely that I would have blown up on the principle (selfishly, but not unexpected for an 11-year-old girl who was emotional and intelligent). Mr. Shores walked me to the car with an apologetic smile on his face, almost sad he missed out on the brow-beating I would have subjecting the principle to.

I went to the high school to watch how the older kids responded to the news. We went to my house afterwards and I spent the afternoon pacing; I couldn't remember the last week day when I was not at some extra-curricular or at a friends house. My parents certainly had no idea what to do with me either.

That was my day. I didn’t sleep well and I went to school the next day in an Old Navy Flag T (remember those?), tie-die-red-white-and blue-knee high socks and bucketfuls of patriotic fervor.

Just like everyone else, at least for a little while.




(Part 2, when I finish with it, will be about how my school reacted over the next two years. There is more to the story about my friends' families, my own family, that film canister, the yearbook, Mr. Shores and the other teachers. Its also about how I feel about it being "the defining point of our generation".)