I sat in a windowless classroom on a sunny fall morning at Falmouth Middle School in my hometown, Falmouth, Maine. It was a science class, taught by the salt-and-pepper stalwart Mr. Plummer. I stared at the clock, anticipating morning break, when Mrs. Girard, the school’s vice principal, walked in. When Mrs. Girard visited, someone was in trouble. They’d be brought to her office. Interrogations would be mad. Parents would be called. She brought kids into her office like she collected them.
But today Mrs. Girard did not do that. Interrupting the class, she asked Mr. Plummer, “May I have a minute of your time?”
The morning was September 11, 2001. When Mr. Plummer returned, he looked uncharacteristically white and stricken. He tightened his belt and returned to teaching.
During morning break, my friends and I began hearing hints of trouble in the cafeteria. Josh Parks, a fellow student, told my group of friends of a cataclysmic world end that sounded straight out of the new superhero films so popular at the time. But everything became clear when I went home and turned on the television. It did look like one of those high-tech superhero films. Manhattan was covered in smoke and thousands were dead.
Through the years, I forgot the initial impact of the tragedies of September 11. The date almost became a cliché to me. Over the years I started looking at it as less of a tragedy and more an excuse for the Bush administration to invade Iraq where thousands of soldiers were killed.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum at The World Trade Center helped put those feeling back in place. I attended Thursday for Betty Ming Liu’s “Downtown” class at New York University.
Ground Zero feels like an industrial graveyard. Once entering the doors on Liberty Street, the staff gives you a pair of headphones for a guided audio tour. The tour, hosted by the father of a firefighter victim, segues between horror stories.
The tour gives many amazing facts. 50,000 people worked at the buildings, giving it a reputation as a “city within a city.” The buildings lightning-speed elevators were reiterated.
The planes hit between floors 93 and 99 at about 400 m.p.h. One woman spoke of climbing down stairs, and the comfort she felt when she saw firefighters on the 28th floor. “If they could go up, I knew I could go down,” she said.
One survivor described, “I was standing in the middle of a snowstorm late at night.”
Looking at the site, the stories were hard to hear. A firefighters’ widow spoke of not finding her husbands remains, and burying a helmet instead. This fact caused me to hide my teary eyes from nearby note-taking classmates.
After the tour we entered the museum. Most striking were the “Missing” signs from those who were frantically searching for lost loved ones. The photos featured victims’ happy faces with nicknames and family contact information. We learned that 19,938 body parts were found, and only 200 complete bodies.
John Henderson, who works in admissions at New York University’s graduate school, spoke our class. He said he began giving tours to make his own contribution to the city after watching the attacks from Washington Square Park. “I remember thinking ‘A lot of people are going to die today,’” he said.
Henderson said he is most irritated when he hears the term “victims’ lost” when describing those killed in the attacks.
“’Lost’ is when you lose your car keys, your student ID,” he said. “These people were mudered. It’s the same thing as putting a gun to their heads and pulling the trigger.”
I walked back to the Subway on the narrow streets of the financial district, imagining what it must have felt like when terror struck it on that sunny fall morning.