8:14 am on a Tuesday

The following post will be a bit off the main subject. I have more to come soon, but for now I want to take a moment to remember a day from 25 years ago that I will never, ever forget. 

American Airlines Flight 11 is being hijacked while passing over central Massachusetts. Somewhere in the stretches of hills and rivers below, I am 12 years old in 6th grade at John Fitzgerald Kennedy Middle School in Hudson, Massachusetts. My home-room teacher is one of the most influential teachers I will ever have, Mr. Hoessel, and for him it is also just another school day.

There are no smart phones to clue us in when, at 8:46 a.m., the hijacked Flight 11 soars over the streets of Manhattan directly into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. There are no news app notifications letting us all know that a second plane had hit the South Tower, or a third plane crashing into the Pentagon. There was one announcement over the intercom that a plane had hit a building in New York City, but for most of the 6th and 7th graders at JFK Middle School learning that 3,000 people died that day would occur all at once when we got home.

The roughly half mile walk from school to my home on Eaton Drive contains the last moments of ignorance from the wider world that I will ever experience. 

It is bliss. 

Twenty-five years later, I still don't know whether keeping us ignorant that day was the right decision. Perhaps there was no right decision. But I remember walking home as a child in one world and opening the door into another. 

There is a tiny black thread, spun from oil, blood, and greed, that runs from events before I was born, through that day, and into events that were then yet to come. Nearly 3,000 lives ended on September 11. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands more civilians would die in the wars waged in its name, while millions of others would live with their consequences. Twenty-five years later, it is difficult for me to remember that terrible morning without also remembering everything that came after it.

“Now the eagle soars the sky

Over refugee and child

And to all there is no end

Another day in perfect hell”

-Flogging Molly, Screaming at the Wailing Wall