Memories from 9/11: from across the Hudson

It was little before 9 on a Tuesday morning. I was in my kindergarten class in Village School Elementary, Homdel, New Jersey. My mom was in Newark, N.J., just across the Hudson River, opposite from Manhattan. The sky was a clear blue. She was in her first year of residency, training to become an OB-GYN physician.

When my mom walked out of the Operating Room, she saw several nurses crowding around a window. That’s when she saw smoke streaming out of the top of a couple of buildings. It was around 9 a.m. My mom just assumed that some accident had taken place.

By 10 a.m., she knew better.

My dad was at home at that point.

He recalls hearing on his car radio that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. He rushed home and turned on the TV, only to watch live as the second plane crashed into the other tower. My dad recalls seeing people jumping off the Towers. They had to decide between jumping or burning to death.

Shortly afterwards, with hundreds of people still inside, both towers collapsed.

I’m not going to pretend that I remember a whole lot about September 11. I was 5. But I do remember a couple of things: On the day of the attack, there was a lot of chaos at my school. Kids were unable to come home from school at the usual time, their parents busy trying to locate friends and family who worked in New York.

And for about two weeks after the attack, I stayed mostly indoors; there was smoke outside my house.

I remember that my dad and I attended a candlelight vigil organized by my school district to honor those lost. A couple of people kept staring at my dad. His skin is brown. And he has a beard.

Tens of thousands of people who live in New Jersey work in Manhattan. There were hundreds of people from where we lived who lost their lives on 9/11. There were parents of kids in my school who didn’t come back.

We’d hear about how cars were seemingly abandoned in parking lots days after the attacks, their owners having never come back. Gradually, however, relatives stepped forward to claim them.

Ten years have passed. I am grateful for many things.

I am grateful that no one I knew personally perished in the attack. I am grateful that the thousands of families who lost loved ones have been, for the most part, able to rebound. I am grateful that I live in a country where people were willing to reach out to those in the New York area who needed aid or consolation after the attackAnd I am grateful that at the time of the attack, I was too young to understand the magnitude of what had happened. I didn’t have to go through the shock and grief most Americans encountered that day. I didn’t know what a vigil was. I didn’t know what a terrorist was. All I knew was that, on Tuesday, September 11, I was picked up from school a little late, because something had gone wrong.