Column by Cheri Rae
It was the second day of school of my daughter’s 4th-grade year; my second day into my new plan to start the morning with an aerobics video instead of the Today Show. So it was a surprise when my husband returned home from his morning coffee routine, flew up the stairs and shouted to me to turn on the news.
It was just about then and there we stood, stunned, and watched the first tower fall and turn into dust on live television. It was as incomprehensible a sight as the hazy memory of seeing our President fall, and a day later, watching, riveted as Lee Harvey Oswald was shot in that hallway so long ago.
It was an all-out assault on everything reasonable, predictable and right. And another morning that everything changed.
The atrocities continued that day and the fear long into that night. Stressed to the limit after my staying with my frantic neighbor until she finally learned her brother in Manhattan was okay, I tucked my kids into my bed, hoping they would settle so I could try to make some sense of the day. They could not, would not, and no amount of soothing, stroking or coaxing would get them to quiet down. I finally yelled at them words I will always regret. “It’s the worst day in the world, and you guys have to stop it now and just go to sleep.”
Three thousand miles away from that terrible place, and for the first time in their lives I could not shield them—just as my parents could not shield me—from the crushing reality of the unthinkable on a beautiful day full of promise turned dark with ash.
It’s the date, like so many in our Nation’s past, that we’ll always remember in minute detail, for in the telling and the in sharing we connect and try to comprehend how our shared history binds us together far more than keeping us apart.
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