It seemed blasphemous to be sitting on the beach today, especially since the beautiful weather was a carbon copy of the conditions in New York on 9/11/01.
This was the first time I was not sharing the anniversary with the students in my classes. Even if 9/11 fell on a weekend, we’d pause the curriculum on Friday or Monday to discuss and remember. As the years marched on, it was mostly discuss because the kids coming through high school today were not yet born or have no recollections.
The actual day is still etched internally. The third floor of the 400 wing gathered in my classroom because we had the only TV with reception, thanks to a coat hanger dangling near a window. Cable had not been hooked up in the new wing yet. We watched the bewildering morning in real time, and then gruesome replays, casting nervous glances at the skies around us. Nothing was improbable.
A few months later I was on a class trip to NYC. The bus dropped us at Ground Zero. The awesome silence around the site spoke volumes about the depth of emotion still felt. I snapped a picture of two beams still standing in the shape of a cross.
In the succeeding years of discussion on the anniversaries, the emotional temperature gradually decreased. Occasionally, a student would tell a personal story that made the memory more vivid for them: “My uncle was in the Trade Center”; “My mother was flying that day”; “We didn’t know where my father was”. Viewing the documentary by the French videographers, who were riding with the first-in fire company to the WTC, or watching the movie “United 93” would still elicit tears from students. But that spoke more to the quality of the works than to the re-lived terror we “real-timers” experience.
On this 16th observance, I drove to Ocean City to spend a couple of days on the beach, but I was very aware that it was the anniversary, even if the memorials were taking an understandable backseat to another horror, Irma.
Once I got to the house, I watched the “United 93” DVD with the same raptness I experience watching “The Passion of the Christ” each Good Friday.
I always wonder about the individuals on the flight. How close is the movie to what really happened? The passengers were not just casualties. They were real people abruptly having to fight for their lives. And what would those lives be like for them today if they had stayed a day longer, or taken another flight, or had a different job, or, or, or?
Later, my app informed me that Ocean City was having a Remembrance Ceremony at 7. I joined a couple of hundred others in front of the 6th St. Firehouse.
The guest speaker was Becky Wynne who told us about her brother, Rick Blood, killed in the South Tower. They never heard from him nor found his remains, but she did not dwell on his death. She brought him back to life for us: an achiever, a musician, a father, a family organizer, a husband, a doer, selfless–as a tribute posted online attests: “It seems like a million years ago when you came into the conference room and said ‘we are evacuating’. Since we were in an interior room with no windows we were not aware of the first plane hitting Tower One. Through luck or divine intervention I made it to the lobby when the second plane hit.”
Rick Blood, according to his sister, was last seen trying to get people to safety from the 78th floor. He was a volunteer fire marshall in the building.
I had never heard of Rick Blood before. Now he is more than just one of the 2,606 killed at the World Trade Center.
We owe all the victims-and all those we deal with in our own lives, for that matter-an identity, an appreciation, a recognition of their essential dignities and worth.
If we made an effort every day, not just on sad anniversaries, some personal meaning might emerge from the senselessness of 9/11/01.
The Q-View 