Ten Years and One New World Later

What is in a name?  I talk about names more often than I should and sometimes my name obsession makes me sound like John Proctor from The Crucible.  However, how many of you know that today has a more proper name than “9-11”?  Today is actually Patriot Day. 

So in honor of this, realistically the tenth Patriot Day (But technically the ninth as I believe that Patriot Day was first observed in 2002), I thought that I would recall a few of my own memories.

I was a third grader, and a strapping young lad, if I do say so myself.  I had a backpack with wheels that year, which I remember were very popular.  In fact, it was more common (and therefore WAY cooler) to have a backpack that was NOT an actual backpack.  They either had wheels or were a side pack or some were even designed to strap across only one shoulder. 

I headed up to my classroom on that Tuesday morning.  I was feeling nothing special; it was just an average day to me.  If I recall right, it was decent weather, with blue skies and white clouds.  I remember the general feelings of happiness and contentedness.  If I was to guess anything about that day, I think I might have been running a little late to school.

I get to my classroom and I see the television is on in Mrs. Fulton’s class.  I was confused and thought the kids must have persuaded our teacher to watch cartoons before class, but that did not seem right.  Then I looked and noticed it was news.  “Blah!” I recall thinking, “Mrs. Fulton’s watching the news!”  Back then, I didn’t have the love of news that I have now.

Then I realized something was odd in my classroom.  It was quiet.  My class, which I distinctly remember being the loudest class I had in all my 14 years in the Ada Public School System, was silent.  That is when I really looked at the television sets and looked at what was really going on.

My grandmother picked me up that day.  Again, that was something that never happened; it was always my grandfather that picked me up from school.  As we were driving to Glenwood to pick up Chase, I recall Meme saying, “It’s just like Pearl Harbor.”  I wondered silently what Pearl Harbor was, but I knew it must have been bad too.

Beyond the actual day, I only recall one other thing that happened that year that was expressly related to September 11 (although, looking back, I see that many things were repercussions of the attacks).  It was an indoor recess two weeks or a month later.  Normally I played with Legos, but on this day I played with the other boys and we built a large building out of building blocks.  It was probably two feet tall, maybe three.  We then grabbed dinosaurs and started demolishing it. 

The teacher who was on duty came by and started screaming at us.  I remember that she had the reputation of being the “mean teacher”, but I was shocked.  We were just playing dinosaurs!  She was about to put us into time out, when the other boys and I quickly rattled that we were just playing dinosaurs and that it was just part of the game.

She looked at us for a second and said, “Oh,” very softly.  She gazed around the room for a second and said, “Well, let’s quit playing that game.  We’ve all had enough of buildings being torn down for a long time.”

 I now believe that what I always recollected as anger was just sadness… fear... and the pangs that come with losing innocence.  However, that may be over analyzing the situation. 

The other thought that I have had today, one decade older at 18 instead of 8, is this.  Someone Tweeted “what we should do”, and I have thought of it off and on… it is the words to my LEAST favorite hymn in the whole history of hymns that I have ever sang, but today it makes more sense to me than ever before.  I leave you with the words to “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep

Silence”.

      Let all mortal flesh keep silence,

            and with fear and trembling stand;

            ponder nothing earthly-minded,

            for with blessing in his hand,

            Christ our God to earth descendeth,

            our full homage to demand.