Fifteen Years Later

Fifteen years ago on a brisk Tuesday morning in September, I laced up my running shoes and jogged around Lake Lagunita on the Stanford campus. The air was cool and dewy with the fog still clinging to the foothills, but by mid-run I had tied my sweatshirt around my waist and was damp with perspiration.  The day would be a warm one.   School didn’t start for another few weeks, but all the Residential Assistants had arrived early for training.  Upon my return to the dorm, I hurried down the hall to women’s bathroom and heard murmurs and gasps coming from the lounge. It would a moment that would forever imprint in my memory. A day plucked from thousands. One that I can conjure as vividly and intensely as the births of my own daughters.

RA Training was inevitably canceled that day.  Instead, eighty or so of us upperclassman gathered in a conference room and scrutinized the live television coverage on a 28-inch tube TV in make-shift rows of hard plastic chairs.  The room was eerily somber. Even when the same coverage began to loop over and over, smoke billowing from the towers and the surreal shot of that second plane hovering on the brink of the building, we sat there, stupefied and welded to our seats.  There were rumors of a plane still in flight bound for San Francisco.  United Airlines Flight 93.  All of us, silently wondering if there was someone on that flight whom we might know.  All of us, mentally scanning our roster of incoming freshman for those who listed New York City as home.  Fearing whose father, whose aunt, whose cousin might be perilously stranded on the upper floors of the World Trade Center.

I remember calling my family that day, clinging to my desk phone like a barnacle as I heard by mom’s colossal heave of maternal relief.  I called my grandparents, my siblings, my friends scattered about the country, even one long-distance dial to Australia.  I felt the urgent need to gather them all, to hear their voices and familiar cadences and inflections. I curled up on my yellow bean bag chair with the sagging smiley face flattened beneath me and let them all envelop me.  Here was proof. There was still something good. 

  

I laced up my sneakers again today, but this time to escape on a walk through my neighborhood.  The normal upheaval of my family’s early morning breakfast routine - protests over hand-washing, fits over the amount of cereal milk and pouts over who claimed the Ariel sippy cup proved especially suffocating.  I needed some solitude.  

It was another gorgeous September 11th morning.  The infant sun was already white and blinding, forcing me to squint under the shield of my sunglasses.  Fleetwood Mac was playing in my earbuds, but I could still hear the satisfying pop of fallen acorns crunching under the weight of my heels.   I was thinking about the legacy of this day.  Despite not personally knowing anyone who lost their life fifteen years ago, I felt the weight of it before I went to sleep last night and it was my first thought as my dreams dissipated into wakefulness.

To my four-year-old daughter, this day is simply Grandpa’s birthday and the Lemonade Stand, an annual charity fundraiser my parent’s block started in 2002.  We go every year, drop cash in a bucket for a local non-profit and watch the neighborhood kids frolic around with brownie smudges on their faces and dirt caked on bare feet.  It has become an end of summer ritual and one that is filled with face painting and balloon animals and visits from the local fire department.  The real reason behind the lemonade stand I cannot share with her yet, though I find myself searching for an honest and somehow restrained way to one day explain it.  Right now, I can still turn off the evening news and turn on Daniel Tiger.  I can still distract her with her math games on her iPad as we disrobe and file through airport security.  She doesn’t understand the ‘why’ behind it all yet and it hasn’t dawned on her to ask.

As I crossed a vacant soccer field this morning, the damp grass licking at my ankles, I heard the rumble of a jet overhead.  It was one of those jumbo 747’s having just ascended from O’Hare with the upper deck visible from the side before it turned and soared directly above me.  The sky was a vast canvas of cornflower blue without a single cloudy blemish and as the plane passed overhead, its outstretched wings seemed to glide through the air with the natural ease of an albatross.   The sight was so magnificent and peaceful that I pulled the buds from my ears and was awed by the sheer miracle of man-made flight.   I watched that mammoth plane carve out its path in the sky until it was gone and only its contrail lingered, a spidery wisp of white dissolving into azure.

   

As I resumed my walk I wondered if there had perhaps been a passenger aboard peering down at my smallness through his oval window.  I wondered if he might have seen me, a mere speck of color amidst a blanket of green grass.  Just a single human, standing erect, watching with reverence, mourning a loss, but with a hand on her heart.