My personal experience with 9/11 was a lot like most people’s my age. I don’t know anyone by name personally that was killed. My hairdresser said one of her clients had a daughter who was a flight attendant but that is my closest personal connection. I am rather blessed for this. Losing someone you love to a situation you don’t understand is surely a painful experience and I (being a first grader at the time) didn’t understand 9/11 in the slightest.
I remember sitting on carpet squares in my classroom listening to Ms.Hindricks, my spunky young teacher, explain in her southern drawl -to the best of her ability- that a plane had crashed on the world trade centers to a bunch of doe-eyed six-year-olds. I had no idea what she was talking about.
Why was she so upset?
Doesn’t she know that plane crashes are pretty common?
“New York City” and the “Pentagon” in “Washington” sounded like such foreign and distant terms to me… and anyway my teacher hadn’t specified whether it was “Washington D.C.” or Washington State,” which really had me confused.
It was cutting into snack time so I decided not to ask.
When I got home that day the TV was on, which is very uncommon for an afternoon in my household. I still had no grasp on the real graveness and importance of the event but I liked being a know-it-all, so I was excited to play the Bearer of World News to my mother...
but she already knew. How does everyone already know about something that happened this morning? The TV was playing endless loops of a plane hitting a building. I remember clearly glancing at it from the hallway, confused and determined to figure it out for myself.
Several months later we were on a vacation in Disney World where my mom bought a popular print of Mickey Mouse shaking hands with a firefighter. She explained to me that some of the money went to the 9/11 memorial.
It all made sense to my by then much more analytical 7-year-old mindset. Terrorists had crashed planes into the police and firefighter headquarters of the world so that they would therefore be able to do anything without getting put in jail or having their damage reduced. It was so obvious, and I had figured it out.
8 or so years later I got to take my first trip to NYC with my high school theatre department. We took a tour of the city which, as would be normal for a tour of New York, featured a trip to the Twin Towers memorial site. Obviously I had a better grasp on the reality of what had happened by then (although I do give props to my 7-year-old self for forming such a creative and explanatory hypothesis) but the magnitude of it... the sheer size alone hit me with what felt like a super powered shrink-ray. Things that passed as white noise before flashed in luminescence before my eyes.
So many people affected, so much damage, such a massive issue, the war on terror, World Trade Centers, Al Qaeda, Rebuilding, patriotism, and me in all of my puny insignificance sitting on my carpet square trying to make sense of it all.
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