As tower and fortress fall, we watch
With disbelieving stare
And numbly hear the anguished cries
That pierce the ash-filled air.
– Carl Daw
I woke up to the pre-dawn morning light peering through the window of the room I communally shared with my cousins. Compared to the pre-bedtime fiasco, the interior was serene and quiet, save for the occasional human breath and snoring. I crept to the den to watch the news on television. It too, was also quiet, yet it was totally vacant with me as an exception.
I switched the cable TV on to Bay News 9, as the hosts of the sleepover were Bright House Network subscribers. On the screen, a women’s chorale in blue-and-white striped Oxford shirts and black A-line skirts filed through a crowd of reporters and broadcasters to their bleachers in a convention center-like setting.
Once on their respective bleachers, the chorale sang the anthem, When Sudden Terror Tears Apart, with words by Carl Daw and music by my parents’ best friend, Brad Printz. I earmarked it as a musical reminder of my parents’ causes of death and the fact that after some time living with a caring foster home family, with children who are over nine thousand times nicer than my normal, non-autistic classmates in school, in Seffner, Florida.
I’m now an orphan who graduated from high school and have used my college money to aid me in my survival.
Mom and Dad boarded Flight 11 to attend one of my aunts’ wedding near Los Angeles from Boston’s Logan International Airport, 10 miles from what used to be my home. When their plane rammed into the North Tower of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11 over eight years ago, I once thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone who perished in an instant on the plane. That was until a phone call revealed the grim truth about my favorite choral composers of liturgical music of my Catholic heritage – my own Mom and Dad – to me.
With my college funds and panhandling money in hand to pay for the bare necessities, I was a destitute college student in need of a warm, loving shelter and a decent education.
When the choir swelled to G major from G minor on the words,
From this abyss of doubt and fear,
We grope for words to pray –
And hear our stammering tongues embrace
A timeless Kyrie.
My ex-cousin came to the den to watch it with me and sang along with the television broadcast. I sang along with the screened choir too, as the anthem memorializes Mom and Dad. I noticed that to the left of them, a men’s ensemble awaited their turn after this musical tribute my ex-cousin, the video choir, and I were singing until the very end. The audience in the television, my ex-cousin, and I applauded (softly, as the others have not awaken yet) the choir for an outstanding job.
But why broadcast such a tribute to Mom and Dad – victims of the September 11 attacks – on a fine morning like this? I didn’t notice that the info bar on the bottom of my television screen read that the day I watched it was on a September 11, exactly nine years after my parents died when their plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
When almost everybody in the house was sprawled all over the living room and dining room, some reclining on couches, some sitting erect on chairs for breakfast, I told them about the broadcast. But the living room and foyer disappeared in an instant.
I felt like any other destitute, homeless person one would readily spot at any intersection of your nearby Main Street, USA . In fact, I was one of them. Life was emotionally and physically arduous on a 20-year-old pauper girl like me.
Based on one of the author’s dreams.