I should be doing A&P homework right now, but here's a short essay I had to write last quarter instead. It's pretty rough, but I don't have anything else to write about right now except for how ready I am for summer break. (Very ready.)
Though I was born one month and nineteen days after September 11, 2001, I grew up believing that all adults were good; that people naturally grew out of selfish tendencies as they got older. After all, every adult I had met was kind to me, so it stood to reason that all adults were nice. Adults were invincible. I was given no reason to doubt this until a video I watched after entering first grade at six years old.
Maybe my teacher had meant to insert a different videotape that day; maybe someone had recorded over its original content without her knowing. Any explanation I can give is better than the assumption that my teacher intended for us to see what came up on the screen; and yet, I still wonder, why else would she have let the tape play out?
After-school care was a place I loved. All of the kids whose parents couldn’t pick them up immediately would be sent to a classroom where we’d eat snacks, play games, and watch movies under the supervision of an adult volunteer. I especially liked to play Mancala, although I wasn’t totally sure how it worked – I was mostly just fascinated by the shiny game pieces. We drank orange juice – the “good kind”, as we called it, if we were lucky – and argued over whether it was made with real oranges. We sang fragments of songs from Silly Songs with Larry over and over and over again, like repetitive toys that play just a portion of a song at the push of a button. We watched cartoons like Dumbo, Bambi, and Pippi Longstocking and imagined versions of the movies that starred us. But the video we watched on this particular day was a far cry from Disney material.
Although it occurred less than two months before my birth, I had never been made aware of the terrorist attack that happened on 9/11. Certainly, there was a better way to inform me than to show me the news footage firsthand. What I saw that day on the TV screen is not something I’ll easily forget. Flames, explosions, and massive dust clouds formed the background for crowds of people desperately running, bleeding, coughing, and crying. Adults don’t cry. I didn’t understand what I was seeing, and the explanation my dad tried to give me after picking me up from school only carried my misunderstanding further. I still held an innocent, if shaken, belief that adults generally had my best interest in mind.
Where were you on September 11, 2001? If I were to ask that question of almost anyone born before 1995, they would be able to recount the day with clarity. If you were to ask me where I was when 9/11 happened, I would tell you I was sitting on the floor of a grade-school classroom drinking orange juice and playing Mancala, because that’s where I was when it first became real to me; that’s where I was when my picture of the world turned a little darker for the first time.