Never Forget

"Eventually September the 11th will be a date on the calendar, it'll be like Pearl Harbor day. For those of us who lived through it, it'll be a day that we'll never forget." – President George W. Bush

I was 10 years old. A student in Mrs. Quintal’s 5th grade class at East Gate Christian Academy. We were going through our morning routine when suddenly Mrs. Q was called out of the classroom. When she returned she looked upset-I thought we had done something wrong. Then she smiled and the day continued as normal. At the end of the day we received yellow pieces of paper stating, “Due to the events in our nation today parent-teacher conferences have been re-scheduled.” I didn’t understand what that meant; as we waited to be picked up the older kids told us there had been a terrorist attack and planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. I was so confused. I’d never heard of the World Trade Center. And I was young and innocent, I had no idea what terrorism meant. As we drove home my father explained what had happened, and even though the sky was clear and blue I was sad. The entire rest of the day and coming week really was spent watching the news…we never watch the news…I am forever haunted by the images of people jumping to their death and of those towers literally crumbling.

It wasn’t until 6 years later, as a junior in high school taking American history that I began to understand what 9/11 really means to me. As I studied World War I, the Great Depression, the attack on Pearl Harbor, I started to think about the people who lived it. The children who watched their fathers go to war, the parents who struggled to raise their children, the people who kept their ears zeroed in to the radio on December 7, 1941 (just as I would be glued to my television 60 years later)-I realized that what I saw as a page in my text book was real to those people that lived it. And just as they would always remember those events, I would never forget where I was or how I felt on September 11, 2001.

We are taught history in school because it teaches us how events change the course of our lives. September 11 was the first time that my personal history and world history truly crossed paths. It was the first world event that changed my life. And while my children and grandchildren will only understand it as a day in history, I will always remember September 11, 2001 as a day that changed my history.