I had woken up and started getting ready for school, and my mother was out in the LDK watching the news, cause sometimes she does that before she goes to work. I remember her standing there with her head and one arm in a sweater, just staring at the TV. I couldn’t see what was on it, but she must have heard me. She looked at me and took a step to the side, and I saw the South Tower in ruins on the ground. This was shortly after seven in the morning.
I didn’t quite understand the impact of what happened, but that was New York, this was Dundee, Oregon, and I had only been in America for five years at this point—my English was improving, but a lot of the cultural bits were still getting filled in. This was a tragedy, yeah, but how often did this happen?
On the schoolbus was hushed mumbling, no rambunctiousness, conjectures whispered and conspiracies flying unchecked. No one even knew who was dead or alive, but we were glad it was just the South Tower that hit.
When I got to my first period English class, the full literary one I still struggled with, there was no teaching, no handing back my essay with a C at the top, none of the usual. There was a belted cart television, and the news was playing, same as at home.
And that’s how I found out the North Tower fell on the bus ride to school.
All day long, we shuffled mindlessly from classroom to classroom, no teaching, watching belted TVs of firefighters picking through the rubble. Scores and scores of dead were found. Kevin Cosgrove’s last call was played so many times that I still remember that he had misspelled his boss’ name as Ostaru in stead of Ostrau, a fact I had later looked up when I was older in life as that call recording continues to haunt my very existence even now, can even hear his final “oh no oh god!” in my head as the tower collapsed.
At the start of the class, kids would be called out by name to the principal’s office and this naïve Tanis thought they were in trouble, but no, every single goddamn time they would come back thoroughly emotionally befucked and sad, angry, and I remember one kid named Kyle just walked back into the classroom after being called by the principal, he just started decking the whiteboard as hard and as fast as he could until there was a bloody smear; no one made a move to stop him, not even the teacher.
I ended up finding out sometime at lunch that the other kids getting called to the principal’s office had lost family; Kyle had lost his dad.
At the end of the day, we were still watching the belted TVs, and we all collectively realized this was the end, we didn’t know what it was the end of, but we knew something was over.
I was sixteen when the towers fell.
I had woken up and started getting ready for school, and my mother was out in the LDK watching the news, cause sometimes she does that before she goes to work. I remember her standing there with her head and one arm in a sweater, just staring at the TV. I couldn’t see what was on it, but she must have heard me. She looked at me and took a step to the side, and I saw the South Tower in ruins on the ground. This was shortly after seven in the morning.
I didn’t quite understand the impact of what happened, but that was New York, this was Dundee, Oregon, and I had only been in America for five years at this point—my English was improving, but a lot of the cultural bits were still getting filled in. This was a tragedy, yeah, but how often did this happen?
On the schoolbus was hushed mumbling, no rambunctiousness, conjectures whispered and conspiracies flying unchecked. No one even knew who was dead or alive, but we were glad it was just the South Tower that hit.
When I got to my first period English class, the full literary one I still struggled with, there was no teaching, no handing back my essay with a C at the top, none of the usual. There was a belted cart television, and the news was playing, same as at home.
And that’s how I found out the North Tower fell on the bus ride to school.
All day long, we shuffled mindlessly from classroom to classroom, no teaching, watching belted TVs of firefighters picking through the rubble. Scores and scores of dead were found. Kevin Cosgrove’s last call was played so many times that I still remember that he had misspelled his boss’ name as Ostaru in stead of Ostrau, a fact I had later looked up when I was older in life as that call recording continues to haunt my very existence even now, can even hear his final “oh no oh god!” in my head as the tower collapsed.
At the start of the class, kids would be called out by name to the principal’s office and this naïve Tanis thought they were in trouble, but no, every single goddamn time they would come back thoroughly emotionally befucked and sad, angry, and I remember one kid named Kyle just walked back into the classroom after being called by the principal, he just started decking the whiteboard as hard and as fast as he could until there was a bloody smear; no one made a move to stop him, not even the teacher.
I ended up finding out sometime at lunch that the other kids getting called to the principal’s office had lost family; Kyle had lost his dad.
At the end of the day, we were still watching the belted TVs, and we all collectively realized this was the end, we didn’t know what it was the end of, but we knew something was over.
Turns out, it was our freedoms.
I’m 41 now. I still have the memories of that day, and absolutely nothing of the day before or the day after.
It’ll be 25 years this September.