I was teaching at a rural high school in Kentucky, not too far from Cincinnati. I had a brand new teaching assistant that day. He hadn’t even finished out his two week notice at his previous employer, a gas station. He was in for the busiest night of his position there that night, but didn’t know it yet.
The day was beautiful, and my class of students with disabilities had been away at PE for second period. I'd been busy preparing for lessons when I heard them returning. As the class came in, my first teaching assistant came in and asked me to turn on the TV. I don't think we'd had it on yet that year, and found that the sound didn’t work, so we watched the skies of New York and later D. C. and a field in Pennsylvania with closed captions running.
I reached for the phone to have my husband watching. I emailed my mom—I didn’t own a cell phone. My cousin's train ran under the World Trade Center. She had a long walk home, but was safe.
One of my students kept asking the question we all did, “Why?”
The physicality of signing the words, “A plane hit the building,” over and over is burned in my memory.
Justin and I had dinner plans with friends that night. We kept them. At dinner their phone rang, and they heard there was a run on gas. Justin and the two of them went to fill up cars, while I sat with their little girl. Then we watched, replays and rescue efforts, commentators, men dancing in the streets in a far away land. We saw our President promise to keep prices from skyrocketing in people's panic. We saw prayer vigils and flags. Our nation united...for a time.
It was savage and beautiful: the acts of kindness in the face of tragedy. People showed up: they drove boats to evacuate Manhattan, dug through rubble, and held open doors. They put up pictures in hopes of finding loved ones, lit candles, and joined in prayer.
It was 9/11.
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