My 9/11

I needed a little break from Sweetwater this week.

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was thirty-five years old with an eleven-year-old son and a seven-year-old daughter. Just eight weeks earlier, Barrett’s job had moved us from North Carolina back to Texas, the state where both of our children were born. I was still unpacking boxes, and the kids were adjusting to their new schools. Barrett was away in Carthage, Wisconsin, taking advanced classes for his job and living away from us six weeks at a time.

I greeted each morning with a cup of coffee and Good Morning America. Back then, Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson were the hosts. That morning, the news was buzzing about a plane that had hit a building in New York City. My first thought was that it must have been some kind of small sightseeing plane. But even before I understood what had happened, I felt uneasy.

That is the way these things go at first. Your mind reaches for something easy to explain, something that makes what you are seeing less terrible than it really is. I had done it before. In 1993, I watched the Branch Davidian compound burn in Waco and told myself they had gotten the children out. Surely they had gotten the children out.

Two years later, in 1995, I was working in Lewisville, Texas, when I heard that a truck parked in front of a building in OKC had blown up. I listened to my patients talk about the bombing all day, but back then, you had to wait until you got home and turned on the TV to actually see what had happened. When the helicopter panned across the missing side of the Murrah Building, I about came undone. This was my home state. The city where I was born. The Murrah Building stood just five and a half miles from the hospital where Patch Baby was born. Then, in 1999, an F5 tornado tore through the Bridge Creek and Moore areas, destroying the homes of my people.

By 2001, I knew that uneasy feeling. This was going to be worse than what we first thought. I didn’t hide what was happening from my eleven-year-old son, but I’m not sure how much registered with my seven-year-old daughter. That day, I was also responsible for my two nieces, eleven and nine. Four children. Three different schools. And Barrett was hundreds of miles away in Wisconsin.

I went ahead and took the children to school. I came straight home, turned on the television, and saw that the second plane had hit. I turned right back around and thought, Who do I pick up first?

Anyone who has ever picked up a child early from school is already cringing. Show your ID, wait for someone to find the child, sign them out, and then wait some more. Not that day. The school didn’t even ask why I was picking up someone else’s child. They announced over the intercom that the kids had been dismissed for pickup, and they were in my car in less than five minutes.

At the two other schools, it was the same. No questions. No usual fuss. Those girls came running out to my car. One by one, I gathered up all four children and brought them home.

By then, the third plane had hit the Pentagon, and soon we learned that a fourth had gone down in a field in Pennsylvania. The news kept replaying President Bush sitting with a classroom of children as Andrew Card leaned down and whispered in his ear that America was under attack.

This was not an accident.

Were we safe?

In the 1970s, at the end of our street—the same street I had walked alone as a kindergartner—a company sold storm shelters, or “bomb shelters,” as we called them. At school, we practiced duck-and-cover drills. Russia was our enemy then. They had bombs, and we knew those bombs could reach us. Somewhere along the way, I had stopped worrying about such things.

Had I grown lax?

I knew even then that this would be my flashbulb memory—the day forever frozen in place, when I would always remember where I was and what I was doing when the world changed. My mother had one for the assassination of President Kennedy. My grandmother, Maggie, had one for Pearl Harbor. September 11 would be mine.

That night, we went to our church and prayed. We prayed for our country, for our president, for the people who had been attacked, and for our safety. I was frightened about what might come next, but in the middle of all that fear, I felt something else too: unity. For a little while, it seemed as though we were all on the same side.

Sadly, I have never felt that unity since.

Twenty-five years later, I’m grateful that my 9/11 story is such a simple one. I can tell you where I was, what I saw, and how afraid I felt, and then I can tell you that I was home. My children were home. Barrett, although miles away, was safe. Our life continued.

For nearly three thousand people that day, it did not. And for the families who loved them, there would never again be an ordinary September 11. All these years later, I am still so very sorry for the lives that were lost and so grateful that my own story has so little to tell.

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  At the new house in Texas, 2001

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  Susanna @ Hidden Lakes Elementary

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  Labor Day, 8 days before 9/11.

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  Bear Creek Intermediate in the background.

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  Bear Creek Park

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