I sat in my Western Civilization class, Tuesday, second period, sophomore year of high school. It was sticky inside the classroom and I had no interest in the conquests of Napoleon or whatever other boring things my teacher was talking about. I gazed out the window at the chirping birds, wishing I could savor the last of summer with them. It was only the second week of school, but it seemed like I’d been there forever. There was a knock on the door. Mr. Bricker stopped lecturing and a young teacher poked her head in, whispering something in his ear and handing him a bright yellow flyer, before leaving abruptly. Mr. Bricker read the paper, frowning.
“Uhh, it says here that about a half-hour ago a plane collided with the World Trade Center,” he told us. “They think it was an accident.” Putting the flyer behind the podium, he began to lecture again, but I could still see the paper, glimpsing bright yellow and flapping in the breeze of the fan.
I was only 15-years-old when it happened, sitting at my desk in a suburban high-school of Northeast Philadelphia. After the fact, I could pinpoint the exact moment that the first plane hit the North Tower, and I realized that I was busy constructing an ugly vase out of gritty red clay in pottery class while people in New York City were dying.
In every hall where I walked that day, I saw the floating yellow flyers – in the hands of hushed teachers who tucked them between lesson plans, or discarded into recycle bins. Students whispered cautiously to each other in the quiet halls, and the administration cut the cable network for that day; they didn’t want us to panic, but most of the students had a cell phone in 2001 and gossip traveled faster than technology. Everyone knew. I remember one girl leaving my math class in hysterics after the principal came to summon her with a beige notice in his hand and a grimace that he couldn’t hide.
When I walked home from the bus stop and unlocked my front door, I found my parents sitting on the couch together, instead of at work. The news was on, and it had been the first time I’d seen images of New York all day. I dropped my bags and stared. People were screaming and running, their faces filled with fear, debris flying everywhere. The footage played over and over again, displaying the World Trade Towers looming over the city, burning in a fiery blaze , while thick black curls of smoke rose and disappeared into a blue sky.
“The towers have been hit!” my mother said franticly, waving me into the room.
At the time, I was 15-years-old and dreadfully defiant, thinking I knew everything. “I know,” I said to my mother. My dad looked at up at me in alarm, with a face that told me I was more than naïve, and he said very seriously, “You will remember this day for the rest of your life.”
Ten years ago, I didn’t understand exactly what he meant or what any of it had to do with me. I didn’t live in New York and none of my friends lived in New York. I was more concerned with going to the mall and painting my toenails, or improving in sports. I was only one girl in all of America, so I asked myself, How can this affect just one person?
Vic was a family friend. He and his wife were in a dinner group with my parents, taking turns hosting parties – cooking, sipping wine, and laughing together. Vic had soft brown eyes and two young daughters. He was a pilot.
Saturday night they had a party at Vic’s house. Sunday morning Vic got called to Boston for a flight. Tuesday afternoon my dad mowed the lawn. Mom stayed inside, before we came home from school, and she sat by the phone. She was waiting for a call – the call to tell her what she already feared and what both my parents hoped was a terrible nightmare. I was there when my mother answered the phone; she breathed into the speaker while I listened intently from the other room. I remember it clearly, though I was trying to be stronger, pretending not to care. I was 15, a rebel who couldn’t possibly see eye to eye with my parents. Still, my heart lurched when Mom cried out painfully, and I watched as she ran outside into the front yard without even putting the phone down.
Dad stopped mowing when he saw her coming, and the mower’s engine sputtered, grinding to a halt. Freshly cut blades of grass were stuck to his boots and his hands were dirty. I watch from the front door, curious and terrified.
“It was him!” Mom cried, and my Dad wailed, as if he were in pain. “It was him,” she repeated. I stood behind our screen door and I watched in stared as my strong, brave father uttered an aching cry and fell to his knees on the front lawn, amidst the shards of broken grass.
That September, on the 11th of 2001, I thought I was a grown-up. I was wrong.
At only 15-years-old in Pennsylvania, I wasn’t raised to understand the gravity of a terrorist attack. Walking into my home after a long day at high-school, I hadn’t realized that my parents’ friend Vic was in danger, and it didn’t occur to me why my parents were sitting on the couch at 2:30 pm watching TV intently. All I wanted to do was gorge myself on Western snacks, complain about how my teachers wouldn’t tell me anything, and find some relief from the heat. However, 10 years later, though I live in Asia and lead a completely different life than my family does, I can still feel the pain that I saw on my father’s face that day. The image of my Daddy, my support and solid force in my life, falling to his knees in his worn gardening clothes, crying over another man, will forever linger in my mind.
Though I may never feel the loss that millions of Americans felt on that day, I feel the loss of one man in my father’s face. That one man, Victor Saracini, pilot of flight 175 from Boston, plus thousands of men and women whose names I don’t know, have changed my life. What I didn’t understand at first, so many years ago, I understand now. Shielded by the screen door in my suburban home, I saw the beautiful sunny day and the way the trees caught the gentle breeze in my front lawn; I saw the lawn-mower, abandoned in the middle of the yard, and I saw my father cry in my mother’s arms, deep heaving sobs that shook his chest and rattled my mother’s frail body. Since that moment, I haven’t dared ask myself How can one life affect just one person?