My friend walked into my little office outside my music room, took my hand and said “we need to pray”.  Slightly bewildered, I said ok and we knelt on the old orange carpet of my office, her words praying for our country, for those affected by this event and some other things I don’t remember.  I didn’t know what had happened.  My classroom did not have a TV, I wasn’t living on my cell phone and I hadn’t seen anything.  She gave me a hug and went back to her room, leaving me confused.

For the rest of the day I wondered.  I had not seen anything yet.  I know that’s probably hard to believe, but I was busy teaching my kids all day and operated as usual.  I wasn’t going home after school as I had a booster meeting to attend at the high school, 30 minutes down the highway from home, so I left the elementary school, drove to the little town where I picked up a burger from the local bar and grill and took it to the high school to eat.  I had over an hour to wait, so  I sat down in the band room, turned on the TV and began my dinner.

The first thing I saw was footage from that morning.  I’m pretty sure my mouth gaped open for quite a while while I watched as my dinner got cold.  How did I miss this that morning?  How did everyone know about this except me?  By the time the boosters arrived I’m not sure how we had a meeting and I don’t remember it.  I do know that for the next week or so I walked around in a daze, traumatized by the sights I had seen, crying at weird times, wondering where we were going from here because looking at New York and Washington, recovery seemed so monumental.  Not just the physical recovery, but the psychological recovery.

In the meantime, our oldest son had watched this unfold in the band room of his high school and he made a life changing decision.  He was going to enlist in the military and serve his country and fight the enemy.  And who was the enemy?  We didn’t really know yet, some kind of extremists who made us realize as a country just how vulnerable we were.  A country that once seemed impenetrable, invincible, was now a victim.  And it changed my son’s life.  He retired after 12 years, a year of that in Afghanistan, with hearing loss, bad knees, multiple concussions and PTSD.  The attack has penetrated our family personally.

Every time I get in line to go through airport security I’m reminded of the event and terrorism in general.  I take off my shoes because of some shoe bomber.  I can’t carry any liquids over 3 ounces because more of certain liquids can explode. The cockpit door of the plane I’m on is sealed shut so that nobody can storm the cockpit.  I am x-rayed, sometimes swabbed and sometimes inappropriately searched because of this event.  The event we’re reminded to never forget.

I’ve stood at ground zero where a beautiful but somber memorial sits, thousands of names engraved on a wall surround a pool of water.  Someone places flowers near the names of those celebrating birthdays, reminding all of the birthdays these people will never again celebrate.  Visitors speak in hushed, reverent tones, feeling the energy of those who died on that very spot, not wanting to disturb their rest.

It has been 18 years to the day since that event and instead of coming together as as country like we did right after this event, this attack, we’ve turned to attacking each other.  Who needs enemies when we’ve made enemies of each other?  It makes you wonder if there are others around the world who just shake their heads at those crazy Americans who can’t get along with each other, much less the rest of the world.  I’m sure that if those thousands of people who died that day could talk to us, they would slap us in the face and ask us what the hell we’re doing, wasting our lives hating each other the way we do instead of using every minute we have to love each other, no matter what.  Because you just never know if and when another event could happen.