The year is 2001 and it’s a bright September morning. I’m five and a half years old and still young enough that I take great pride in those extra six months of experience. My world is caterpillar hunts, alphabet lessons and an undying excitement for the next episode of SpongeBob SquarePants.
The smell of Eggo waffles is in the air, but there are thick plumes of smoke emerging from some tower on my mom’s TV screen. She looks hurt, but I can’t understand why. There’s a coffee mug in her hand and a gentle, fragrant steam sliding along her absentminded face.
Her fingers are clenched clammily around the ceramic. Her cheeks are blanched and frozen. Her eyes vacillate between vacant and a dam at the verge of bursting. The coffee-scented mist rises toward the ceiling slowly and crashes with a muted violence along the graying surface.
“Mom, are you okay?”
She doesn’t appear to hear me.
“Mom?”
Her eyes remain locked on the TV screen.
“Mom?” I repeat again with a nudge as she emerges imperceptibly from a trance. A mixture of numbness, fear and indecision have colored her tired face. She lets her coffee go cold in her hands and after a few minutes begins to look toward the clock. She appears surprised by time’s continued flow, as though the world is sitting still.
With shaking hands and drawn out silence, she drives me to preschool. I can tell that something is amiss, and that the TV screen seems to have caused it.
She turns on the radio, listens for a moment, and turns it off again. I stare out the window of her old Honda at the wide world around me and allow the black smoke that filled the TV screen to flee my mind. I see buildings and buses and dump trucks and statues and a busy world bustling to a different beat from the day before. But I can’t yet make out the altered tempo.
My mom walks me into the school and hugs me with an uncharacteristic urgency.
Inside my classroom, the atmosphere is hardly different from back at home. The teachers aren’t teaching today. The cutout crafts that line the wall even seem to lack their normal luster.
We’re rowdy children with pent up energy playing in our little play area, and they’re dazed adults unsure what’s happening to their country. We look over at them with concern, but there’s hardly a thing we can do to get their attention off of the TV standing stationary on a roll-out cart fixed at the center of the room.
On a good day, adults don’t take us very seriously. They talk down to us, and they don’t listen to us like they do their adult friends. But we don’t usually notice. And if we do, we don’t really mind. Their infantilizing voices console us when we’re sad, and redirect our course when we wander astray. But today, inordinate stretches of time seem to go by where they forget that there are even children with them in the room.
“Why is Mrs. Greenberg crying?” a friend asks. He’s wearing a Rugrats shirt and a look of wide-eyed confusion.
“We didn’t sing our morning song today,” points out another. He’s wearing overalls smudged with jelly.
“Is today a special day?” a girl asks. She has pigtails, a Barbie shirt, and a case of cooties so serious that I’ve spent my first week of school quarantining away from her with like-minded male comrades.
But as the hours tick by, the guiding hand of adults is still almost nowhere to be seen. The teachers each seem to be looking for guidance themselves. They come toward us at sparse intervals with hollow commands and empty stares.
“It’s — it’s snack time,” explains one of them. She feigns enthusiasm. Her eyes are red from fighting tears.
I walk purposefully across the room toward another teacher transfixed on the TV screen.
“Why is Ms. B sad?” I ask.
He doesn’t hear me and I repeat the question with an abrasive yank on his towering arm.
“I — she’s just — I think you should go back and play with the other kids, okay?” He asks kindly. The words come through with his normal warmth, but his face doesn’t sell his conviction.
As years have gone by, the veil around that day has gradually been lifted. With different ages have come different levels of understanding.
By age 7, I know that some bad guys did some bad thing, and that’s why I stand in long lines whenever I go to the airport with my parents now.
By age 9, I know that terrorists are responsible for the attack, and that we’re fighting a war in the Middle East to get the mastermind behind it.
“Dad, do you think they’re gonna find Osama Ben Laden?” I ask airily into the night, mispronouncing the name. I raise the question with a curious tone that would be far better suited to far lighter quandaries. I think naively that terrorism might meet a swift and final end if Al Qaeda’s leader is only brought to justice.
“It’s tough to say, really. He’s probably hiding in some cave in Afghanistan or Iran,” he replies noncommittally. He entertains the question but it’s clear his mind is on bigger matters. “”Do you know those stars in the sky we see right now?”
“Yeah?”
“They’re so far away that they might no longer even exist. It takes that long for the light to reach you.”
And just like that, my attention is successfully diverted.
At age 12, I’ve been tasked with doing a partner project on the events of 9/11. We arrange our presentation into a tri-fold cardboard poster with three different sections. The top of one section reads “Fun Facts.”
“You might not want to use the term ‘fun facts’ in talking about 9/11,” my dad points out astutely.
I put in a stubborn argument for keeping the fun facts section, but my dad persuades me to remove it the night before the presentation. I still struggle to grasp the gravity of that horrific day.
At age 15, I understand that 9/11 was a historic event, not just for our country, but for the world at large. I understand that thousands and thousands of lives have been lost fighting a needless war on an idea. I understand that terror lives on even though Osama is dead and gone.
At age 27, I know that fateful day that I was too young to understand is one that reshaped the entire world around me forever. I know that paradigms can shift gradually, and they can shift suddenly.
At some point in life, we each awaken in bed to a world that’s different from the day before it. Sometimes the differences are small and they can take years to mount. Many times they go unnoticed entirely. And other times, a look outside the window reveals a world that’s different from the one the sun last set on.
We find ourselves walking through onslaughts of security scanners with smart watches on our wrists and phones in our pockets, and we reflect back on a distant yesterday.