September 11, 2001
8:00 a.m. It was my first year as a teacher. I was hired through a special literacy initiative in the Philadelphia School District. I reported to my location as instructed by my hiring documents. First to the main office, then to the off-site building where the kindergarten was housed. It was a Presbyterian church -- a sign that I belonged here, maybe. Before converting to Catholicism for a girl (not my mother) my father was Presbyterian as I suspect many Scottish people are.
8:15 I went to the basement and looked around. The classroom was huge and was a child’s wonderland. Cubbies were lined up in an L shape creating an alcove in the entranceway to the classroom as well as a defined space for the teacher’s planning area. This space contained an adult-sized table with six chairs, a teacher’s desk, some bookcases including a big book storage unit, and a variety of supplies. This is where we planned our week, day, hour. Kid sized tables were on one side of the room and a large rug with a huge magnetic white board on the other side was the main area in the room. This is where the learning happened. The rest of the room was centers - transportation and blocks, housekeeping and dramatic play, library and computers, art and music. It was a perfect space for five year olds.
8:20 I met with my partner teacher, a twenty-year veteran of the school district who had spent her career teaching kindergarten. We didn’t have students yet since kindergarten started a week later than the rest of the students in the K-8 school. We started planning our strategy and she gave me the task of setting up the center areas. She gave me some instructions and I set out to fulfill the task.
8:30 I started unpacking books onto the bookshelves in the library, set up the two old Apple computers (there was some Reader Rabbit software that could make a fun, educational center), then I proceeded to organize the housekeeping and dramatic play area.
8:55 Everything was pretty dusty so I went into the kitchen/cafeteria to get a bucket of water and some rags. The cafeteria crew was gathered around a small television set - old school like you would see in a bedroom in the 1990s. I asked where I might find a bucket and rags and one of the women (who was a lunchtime aid but also the classroom aid in our room in the morning) said, “Don’t you see what’s going on?” I looked at the tv as a replay of the first plane crashing into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.
What the hell was that! My brain could not process what was happening. Was it an accident? We watched in horror as the newscaster tried to make sense of what was happening. Smoke and dust billowed from the building. A fireball shot out of the North Tower. What we didn’t know, but would learn later, fiery fuel poured down the elevator shaft as the building was evacuated. Those occupying the eleven floors above the crash site would not make it out of the tower.
9:03 As the anchorman talked and the minutes ticked by, a second plane crashed into the south tower. Oh. My. God. We all seemed to say or mouth or think at once. It was clear, this was no accident. We were being attacked. We watched, fight and confusion evident on our unbelieving faces, as even the newscasters couldn’t make sense of what we were all seeing.
9:38 As we waited for instructions from the District, a third plane, a third attack. Flight 77 hit the Pentagon building and the crash site was in flames. Crowded in front of the thirteen inch tv, we watched with horror on our faces and terror in our hearts. We waited anticipating more attacks.
9:59 In what seemed an eternity but was actually only ten seconds, the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed into a heap of stone and dust and smoke. We watched live as the building imploded.
10:00 They closed schools. We had to wait for all students to be picked up before we could leave, so, we continued the doom watch as we news anchors tried to make sense of what was happening. The President was in Florida reading to students and trying to make his way back to the White House to address the grave attack on our nation. President Bush made a statement at the elementary school and for the first time officially told the nation this was likely a terrorist attack.
Things start getting a little surreal at this point. The time is a jumble and it’s hard to tell when things happened after the south tower fell. At some point after school was dismissed, I drove home and it seemed like the entire world was silent. No air traffic, hardly any cars on the streets, the radio was talking about the attack on the towers and the third plane that crashed into the Pentagon some time during the evacuation of the school. And then, a fourth plane crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Where was that plane headed? There was much speculation but no real answers. Surely, the target wasn’t some random field in the south central part of Pennsylvania. Later there would be stories about the heroic passengers on Flight 93 taking back the plane from the terrorists and crashing the plane before it reached its destination.
My husband picked up both kids from their respective schools, the younger one from the elementary school, the older one from the high school. When I got home, we all went to my mother’s house. It was a day for families to be together, for communities to be together, for the country to be together. A nation starting to splinter, showing signs of division, came together on that day. And although it didn’t last, for a short time, we were “one nation, indivisible.” We anxiously waited for what might happen next. Would the attack continue or did we have it under control. Would our cities be bombed next or did our intel quell the attack. Whatever it was, a healthy fear of our military strength or the end of the mission, the attacks stopped
