Nine Eleven

Dear Jack,

I was getting ready for work, a job at a bookstore called Borders when my boyfriend (who would one day become your dad) called me and said,

"A plane has hit the World Trade Center towers."

"What does that mean?" I asked. Was it a plane that lost course, an accident? Was it an act of war? What did it mean that a plane ran into a building in New York?

"I don't know," said your dad.

With those three words I knew that history was happening. Your dad always knows what's going on in the world. He always knows what an event means and what the global ramifications may be. Your dad is my own personal google and the idea that something could happen in this world that he would not immediately understand was terrifying to me.

Somewhere across the state, as I would find out years later, your uncle was hearing this same news and understanding that a terrorist group had the utter audacity to organize an attack on American soil. It was then, he told his friends, that he decided he would join the Army. Living through a moment in history when America felt, possibly for the first time in a generation or more, actually vulnerable, was life changing for him. Life ending as it would ultimately turn out.

Those terrorists who came to America to make their statement were from a previously little known country called Afghanistan. A little more than eight years later, your uncle, a American hero, would die on Afghan soil.

The full circleness of it all just numbs me right now. The idea that a phone call on my way to work would lead from one event to another to the loss of so many, including someone so very dear to us, makes my head spin.

I hope as you grow up, you and your peer group are taught about this day, Nine Eleven, and taught about the terror of the impossible, the heroics at ground zero and in the Pentagon and in the air above that Pennsylvanian field, the lives lost, the promises made. The promise that we as a nation. would. never. forget.

It's not a pretty day. It's not a happy day. It's not a day I ever want to relive. But it's a day that we absolutely cannot forget.

Love,
Mom