Eleven Years later

Eleven years ago today I was getting home from work and was sitting in front of the TV in awe of the events that had occurred earlier that day.

Earlier that day I was "in a class full of innocent children," as the song goes.  I remember quite clear that I was with my first grade students and one of our classroom aides popped her head in my classroom and said an airplane just crashed into the World Trade Center.  It didn't quite register right away.  I thought "World Trade Center?" that sounds so familiar! It's funny how the simple things leave your mind when you are caught off guard. Not too long after, she came back to say another tower got hit.  My immediate reaction was, wow...sounds like we are being attacked.

I turned my classroom television on.  I put the volume on low and faced it towards the window-basically where only I could see and not my students.  The students were naturally curious once worried looks filled the faces of adults.  The only thing I could say to my students was that something has happened in our country, but we are safe.  We are okay.

Eventually parents started one by one coming to pick up their children.  At the time I didn't understand why they felt it was safer to be at home than at their school.  I later realized that it wasn't about safety, it was more about security.

Eleven years later and it seems as if it was not very long ago that these events happened.  It is a day we can't forget and shouldn't.  It was a day that changed us as a nation.  It didn't matter the color of our skin, the language we spoke, the side we voted on...the only thing that was important was that we lived in a great nation. It mattered to be an American.  

May we never forget...may we always remember...September 11, 2001