Member-only story
Eighteen Years
It has become a banality: everyone alive at the time remembers exactly JFK’s assassination and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Banal as it is, I remember both, eidetically. I was in a classroom on November 22, 1963 when the teacher, a Sister of the Congregation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was called out of the classroom, rushed back in, and in a numb voice proclaimed “President Kennedy was just shot.” We children sat watching the newly-installed television, transfixed but blank, while Walter Cronkite made his famous proclamation that “President Kennedy died today.” The nuns were crying; we were just confused.
On 09/11/2001 I was on the way to work on a bus when an announcement was made on the radio: all drivers should avoid the west side of lower Manhattan due to an aircraft incident at the World Trade Center. I assumed that someone in a Cessna or Piper Cub wanted a view and got too close to the buildings, but when I saw the plume of thick black smoke in the distance, and heard someone on a cell-phone exclaim “You mean terrorists?!” I immediately left the bus, crossed the street, and returned home, where my 6-year-old son greeted me with “Terrorists hit the World Trade Center where we visited just last week and is this World War III?” We watched the towers fall on the only working television channel, WCBS 2. Later we sat, silent, on the front porch, the only sound being the…
