Remembering

September 11th, 2001 changed my life forever. 

It was not just a scarring experience that I witnessed on the news. It was a catastrophic event that has truly changed my life down to this very day. The effects of 9/11 are still felt so tenderly for me because, well, the things that happened in 2001 in New York have bitten my heels clear into Idaho, 2014.

I remember getting ready to leave for school when my mom turned on the news downstairs. We had a giant boxed television that came with wheels just so you could move the thing, plus my mother always had a habit of watching the news each morning while she combed out her hair. The only difference was that today, she was doing it all downstairs right as I was putting on my backpack and getting ready to leave.

I heard her whimper, a sound that I heard during those dog commercials where Sarah Mclachlan tries to get you to donate money to the saddest little puppy eyes imaginable. I knew this meant my mom was about to cry. 

I ran into the living room to see the news footage replaying over and over again an airplane crashing into a building. In my little  8 year old mind, I did not know what I was watching, but I knew that it was devastating to make my mom cry like she did.

When my mom finally calmed down enough, she hugged me with the tightest squeeze she could, the news still flashing in the background. She didn't explain anything, only said, "We will talk about this later." and sent me off to school.

At school, they made us watch the news footage over again and asked us if we knew what it was we were watching. All I knew was that it made my mom cry and as I had come to find out, every adult was crying. For some reason, our Pledge of Allegiance that morning was said with more gusto by the students, and more humbly by the teachers.

It wasn't until I got home again and my mother sat us down that I learned what had happened, how many people were thought to be dead. Over the course of the next week, my parents would give me little sound bites of information, but I think a panic must have set in because my mother kept her door closed in the mornings while she watched TV, or she didn't turn on the TV at all.

What my 8-year-old brain couldn't comprehend, my 11-year-old brain could.

My parents bought us tickets to Disney World that year for Christmas. We each got beautiful new suitcases and on top of each one, almost as if it were the bow, was our personal plane tickets to Florida. It didn't take much searching to find this present, it was just merely stuck behind our plaid green couch in our front living room. It took only a glance at the ticket to comprehend Disney! It was the most generous gift my parents had given us up to that point. None of us were expecting it, I think we had pretty much already come to terms with the fact that we would never "vacation" anywhere except for on our sailboat.

Later that year, in May, my parents told us the news. My dad was going to Iraq in just one short month. He would be gone for 24 months in Kuwait as a Tank Commander. They had waited to tell us in order to soften the blow or the sting or the sadness. I went to school the next day and proudly told my 5th grade teacher that my dad had been called to serve, and she hugged me. She held onto me for dear life for what could have been 30 seconds, right in front of the rest of the class as they filed into their seats. I think that the realness of the situation hadn't sunk in quite yet.

I remember we all loaded up in the car and drove to where the soldiers would be flying out. When we got to the base, there was just a sea of green camo. I remember looking out and distracting myself by trying to find people sleeping in that sea. Today, I look back on that and realize that these soldiers were sent off to Iraq alone, with nothing better to do than lie down on the cement next to their bags, no one to send them off, to love them or kiss them. Then, it was just a way for me to be occupied so I wouldn't have to continually cry.

They had all of the soldiers grab their things and stand in a line at attention. One by one, the line filed through and all of the families of these soldiers had to just sit and tearfully watch their husbands, sons, fathers march to the plane waiting out back. A lady would go around to all of the children that were crying the hardest and give them a pin of the American flag, facing as if it were marching into battle. I got one of those pins, but in anger, or frustration, maybe negligence, I lost it that very day.

In the course of two-years, I forgot many things. I forgot what it was like to hear a guitar being strummed in the living room. I forgot what my dad's snort sounded like. I couldn't remember the color of his eyes. All I could remember was "19 months until your dad comes home!" or "13 months until Dad is home!" I remember receiving more Christmas cards that year than we ever had before, and how my mom would tape them up onto the closet door in a way that we could see them all and read their messages. Beside it, she put a picture of my dad on a small table as some sort of homage. The picture was in a golden frame with red and green mistletoe painted around it. I can remember that frame, but I could not remember my dad's height, or where I stood when I hugged him around the middle.

The things I did remember were small, like when we would eat dinner, he would use his hands to speak quite frequently, except for he would forget to first put down his utensils, so he would be waving a knife around or point at us with a spoon or a fork. I remembered the fact that his head always looked so small when he wore the headphones he plugged into his amp. I remembered snapshots, but no real physical detail after too short a number of a months passed. 

We installed a peep hole in our front door after he left. My mom let them install it at my height because I was home most often - I was also the only one that scrambled to get up from whatever I was doing the minute the door bell rang, almost like a little Chihuahua puppy who's bark is bigger than it's bite. By the time my dad returned, I had to bend at the knees to look through that peep hole. 

Today, 10 years later, we no longer have that mistletoe frame. There are no guitars in the house. Our new door does not have a peep hole. I haven't actually even been to my father's new house. I saw him for the first time in a year two weeks ago when my niece was born. So much has changed in my life because of that event. And maybe many will say that it wasn't 9/11's fault, or he knew what he was signing up for when he joined the army. But I don't think many people recognize the after effects, such as PTSD, divorce, separated families, death, lost personalities.

Today, reminds me of so many things, but today mostly reminds me that some of my wounds are still fresh.