My 911

Every anniversary of the September 11 2001 terrorist attack in New York seems more powerful than the previous one. The stories told by survivors, witnesses and responders are often almost too sad to watch. If you send a loved one to combat you always fear that late night phone call or early morning knock on the door, but when the toughest war you face is for the parking spot closest to the door, the thought of your loved ones not returning home rarely crosses your mind. 911 began as just another average day.

I thought of telling my story of that day in 2001, and while it is an ironic one, compared to the losses suffered by others it is a trivial one. I decided to wait a few days so as not to minimize the genuine suffering of others. But I will say that I learned a big lesson that day.

We had a small television in our dining room at the time and we often watched the evening news during our evening meal. This was certainly an exceptional news day, and while this early in the game there was nothing really new about the incident to offer, we watched an endless loop of the two airplanes crashing in to the twin towers. Our attempts to explain what was happening to a four year old were tough ones and honestly just trying not to convey fear and hysteria was our goal as parents.

I though we both had been doing a pretty good job of down-playing the events to my daughter, when out of a blue and cloudless sky, lightning struck the ground a few feet from our home. I couldn’t say exactly what my daughter thought about this explosion, but my wife and I were pretty sure we had just been bombed! What could we think? It was like someone jumping out of closet when you returned home from a horror movie!

I won’t go in to great detail about the damage that lightning strike did to my home or the money it cost to repair this damage; it really does seem trivial after all this time especially when so many others lost so much more. This also has nothing to do with the lesson I learned that day anyway.

That fatal morning I learned that I would spend the rest of my life with my heart outside of my body. I’m not an uncaring person, but as I watched the second airplane crash in to that building, thousands of miles from my home, all I could think of was my heart. After thirty five years of being trapped inside my body, my new heart now had a short ponytail and it was wearing a yellow dress. I had just left it beating unprotected twenty miles away in a classroom with nineteen other innocent and oblivious Pre-K kids. That valuable muscle I had protected for so long now belonged to someone else.