Observations on the 5th Anniversary

Five years ago our country experienced a seminal event; an event recounted within the pages of the Crier this week. A little over five years ago, I was a different person before the terrorist attacks of 9/11. A young mother, full time employee, recent home owner.

That June my husband and I posed with the SOLD sign in front of our home the day we moved in. One of our first acts of home improvement included installing a flag pole by the front door for Old Glory. A few weeks later I cut back my work as a researcher for a small think tank to take more time to be with my son, something I hadn’t been able to do since a short maternity leave following his birth.

In September, my husband’s job as an engineer for a defense think tank took him to an Army base in Bosnia, a place still dangerous in 2001. Anticipating the workload and security concerns, he planned weeks for his project while I planned to work from home for the duration of his trip.

On that mundane Tuesday morning which dawned sunny and crisp, I first learned of the hijacked planes on a news website. At first I thought of one small plane, woefully off course. I turned to the television for clarification and watched the horror of that day unfold on the news.

So much changed in a flash; for the terrorized passengers on those flights, the office workers trapped in the buildings, and their families. So much changed for those who survived and so much changed for our country. The events of one morning never before had such impact.

My husband, half a world away in Bosnia, heard the news just before I did and tried to stay out of the way while the base locked down and went into high alert. News reports became ever more alarming, as every few minutes we learned of another attack, another suspicious incident, another building evacuated, and on and on all day and for days afterwards. The bomb scares, the collapsing buildings, Cantor Fitzgerald, the fleeing workers and residents, the brave firefighters and police officers, the speeches, the three months of fires at Ground Zero, the anthrax, the clean –up, the decimated airline industry, the air quality, the job losses… these are just a handful of the images that followed in the wake 9/11.

My office, evacuated due to its close proximity to a federal building in Boston, shut down for a couple of days. Like so many parents, I picked up my son from his daycare center that morning, wanting him nearby in case the destruction came closer. And the family gathered. My brother-in-law, recently home from three years of teaching in Japan, came over and my mother drove down from her home in Maine a few days later. We all watched the news together and found things to distract my son from the gloom of the television that we just could not shut off.

I remember taking us all for a drive just to escape the despair. It was sunny, beautiful, and vibrant, like most autumn days in New England. And all the tragedy seemed otherworldly and detached. The quiet skies, the ticker tape line at the bottom of news screens, the television channels off the air in respectful salute, and the Hollywood telethon. My memories combine into a haze of the sorrow and anger and determination I felt at that time.

But perhaps what I remember most from that days and weeks that followed September 11, 2001 were the abundance of American flags. On car bumpers, flying from homes, the occasional flagpole hoisted in the back of a pick-up, in storefronts; people everywhere donned the flag as the symbol for which it was originally created, national unity. For a few short weeks we weren’t rich or poor or middle class, we weren’t White or Black or Latino. The political divides that existed before 9/11 and returned shortly thereafter were leveled in the wake of those buildings for just a short time, and for a little while, our nation lost her collective cynicism and became one nation of Americans again.

After 9/11 my family played a game in the car with our not-quite three year old, counting American flags we saw while driving around town. Many are gone now, replaced in some cases by seasonal decorative flags, or not replaced at all when the old ones became worn. And for Halloween that year my son joined scores of little firemen as they stalked the streets for sweets that night, going from house to house in a sober reminder that our firefighters were again at the top of the hero chain.

Today parents are charging football fields; occasionally a driver shares a rude hand gesture, and I guess in some ways we’re back to where we were before 9/11. Perhaps that ability to return to normalcy, rather than adjust to the “new normal” touted by news outlets in a limp attempt at gravitas, marks the true American spirit. That national glue, that strong sense many of us had of being American, lies just below the surface, everyday.