9/11 – AP Photo

I woke up this morning remembering the September 11^th of fifteen years ago.  It was a Tuesday and we were ‘sleeping in’ after a big weekend celebration for my mother’s 90^th birthday.  A phone call from North Caroline woke the household.  It was Frances Mitchell’s pilot son who had received an early a.m. standby alert.  He was calling to tell his mother to stay put.

Too late.  Frances and her friend Dick had left the day before to drive down the coast.  “Something has happened,” he said.  “Turn on your television set.”  And so we sat with Charlie and Marta and watched the horror of the day unfold.  Charlie decided to drive his rental car back to L.A. despite the contract he had signed to return it to PDX.  Marta stayed an extra day and then went up to the San Juans to visit friends as previously planned.  I’m not sure what we did.  Only that first part of the day is forever etched in memory.

FDR Delivers Pearl Harbor Speech, 12-08-1941

It was “a date which will live in infamy” as President Roosevelt had said of December 7, 1941 and, like Pearl Harbor Day, 9/11 would be forever etched in our minds.  I was five when Pearl Harbor was bombed and I remember clearly sitting in front of our big console radio with my mom and dad, listening to FDR’s speech.  If I didn’t exactly understand the words, I fully realized that something terrible and important had happened.  My dad’s tense expression and my mother’s anxious insistence that I sit in her lap while she held me tight told me more than the tinny-sounding words coming from far, far away.

The other date that is clearly etched in the minds of my generation, of course, is November 22, 1963 – the day President Kennedy was shot.  I was in the middle of teaching a math lesson to my second grade class at Southgate School in Hayward when the principal came to the door and beckoned me into the hallway with the news.  At that point, JFK was still alive.  Teachers were informed but we were cautioned not to tell our classes…yet.

November 22, 1963

I’m sure there are people far wiser than I who could tell us why those days of shocking uncertainty stick in our minds so vividly – more clearly defined than most joyous celebrations that we’ve also experienced over the years.  Why do we remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when Martin Luther King, Jr was shot and then, not two months later, when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated?  Not that I’m am regretting those memories… We need to remember.  Just as we need to redouble our efforts toward peace and harmony and understanding.  Now more than ever.