9/11...7 Years Later.

You know when I was a little girl, my mother would always tell me about her experience of a worldwide life changing event - when everyone it seems felt the same vulnerability. For my mother’s generation that event was when President John F. Kennedy was so horribly killed in such a frightening way. For my generation the event was September 11, 2001 when those two buildings fell in almost slow motion. I feel I could wager that just as how my mom’s colleagues could always remember where they were and what they were doing on that fatal day, my contemporaries too will forever have this date etched in their minds and the feeling of helplessness that occupanied the disaster.

I remember how much of a beautiful morning, September 11, 2001 had started out as being as I cradled my baby in my arms. I remember how that all changed in a heartbeat. I remember being struck by the cacophony created as every available sirened vehicle rushed down to the scene to assist in anyway possible. I remember TV showed nothing else. I remember the smell of burning ruins with all their contents burning too, that filled Brooklyn’s skies and parched the back of your throat. I remember the darkness that covered that city during the daylight and people just standing outside looking up for answers to the common unspoken question…”Is this the end?” I remember children being stuck at home panic-stricken as they longed for some word, any word of their parents fate. I remember seeing thousands walking home trying desperately to get a signal on their cell phones as the roads in were closed, heavily guarded and public transportation halted. I remember how communication ceased in the city as one of the WTC towers had an important transmitter that was lost in the days events. I remember how much that day caused people to look at themselves and reorder their priorities.

I also remember the change that followed and New Yorkers rallying to tame the turmoil. How a city that was known for being distant and unfeeling wore its heart on its sleeve and the entire world reached out to comfort it. I remember the vacuous hole that appeared in the center of the city once the rubble had been cleared became a pilgrimage of the macabre that everyone had to make and the twin rays of light that beamed up into the sky soon afterwards in ethereal remembrance of what was. I remember looking down into that deep unforgiving cavern marveling through my tears.

Since that time, hope has replaced fear and has finished a memorial to that day at the sister site in Washington DC. Hope is rebuilding on that same Manhattan site with reverence and a view to the future. Hope is everywhere even outside of a little town in Arkansas and as Jamaicans would say, “its better to live in Hope than Constant Spring.” So now the air is no longer blocked by haze and my baby is a second grader who on a clear crisp, September 11, 2008 is being taught to respect and never forget, September 11, 2001 while expectations remain bright. The world has changed. Selah.