No one really talked about it much on campus today. My eighteen-year-old students? They were pretty young when the towers fell. They remember that tragic day the way I remember Kennedy's assassination: it was something that made grown-ups cry.
This afternoon I heard the man in the next office talking to his officemate: back in 2001, he was working in Big City Like No Other, close enough to smell the burning and be part of the panic. I saw remembrances on twitter and facebook; I felt that twinge every time I looked at the date. I know two students who lost parents on that Tuesday in September.
I posted on twitter a link to my own poem about teaching the day after September 11. A friend and former student from Little Green responded by writing up a memory that will not fade: where on campus she was when she heard the news. Later in the day, I read a piece by a friend and colleague from my days at Snowstorm University, who writes about losing her daughter.
This evening, a storm is sweeping through the region. I am sitting alone in my living room, just watching out the window, listening to the rumbling and crashing of thunder, watching the jolts of light that break apart the whole sky.
4 comments:
Beautiful poem.
ChrisinNY
Beautiful, the rhythm reminds me of breathing, even and ragged at once.
I was in Alexandria, and I could see the smoke from the Pentagon. The Blue Line, the metro line that serves the Pentagon and Pentagon City, did not shut down. I took that train home that evening. It didn't stop at Pentagon for a while, it just shot through that stop, and the lights were mostly out. When the train resumed its stops at Pentagon, there were guys with machine guns standing guard at the stop.
Nobody at work talked about the anniversary of it a few days ago. The TV in the breakroom had the media stuff going, but...
It will always be a sad day for me, along with the Challenger explosion, the two Kennedy assassinations, and several other such memories.
:-(
On another subject entirely, I'm going camping tomorrow--I was sick all summer. I had to cancel our memorial day trip, never could schedule another.
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