I didn't pay much attention to the memorials this year either, but I didn't forget. Unless something really bad happens to my brain, I will never forget.
It was such a beautiful day. I remember that so well. It was such a beautiful day, and I overslept, and didn't check the news. The planes hit while I was still in bed, the towers came down while I was in class, and I found out when I came home to get my stuff together for my next class. I remember watching over and over on one of the televisions in the main computer lab/study area, the planes hitting, the towers tumbling, the dust, the smoke. That the Pentagon had also been hit, and another plane went down in PA just made it all the more surreal. It was such a beautiful day. Not a cloud in the sky, but after the news broke and the magnitude of the events sunk in, it seemed as if the sun itself had dimmed, and everything looked different.
My campus got hit pretty hard. Lots of students were from NYC or DC. Morale hit the skids for a while. It didn't help that one of our alumni was on the infamous Flight 93, and was one of the leaders in the charge. My sister was at NYU at the time, and the disruption there was far far worse. She got evacuated from her dorm and spent three days living in the school gym along with a few hundred other students. The school handed out free toiletries and other sundry items because noone had time to pack anything.
One month later, my school held its 150 year anniversary celebration as planned. There were three days of festivities. The theme was freedom, and we were having speakers and performers coming in with presentation encompassing that theme. It was sheer serendipity that freedom should be our theme as the event was scheduled and planned long before 9/11/01. Remember how everyone was afraid to fly? Well my dad decided that the best way to address the issue of terrorism was to give the terrorists the finger and fly across the country to visit me on that weekend. My brother came along. I was in the campus orchestra, and we performed that weekend. I don't remember the whole program, but we did the William Tell Overture. We didn't get to rehearse the William Tell much because the other music was so challenging, and the conductor almost dropped it altogether, but the principle cellist sent an e-mail two days before the dress rehearsal saying something to the effect of "Come on guys, we have to do this." I'd played the William Tell before, and so had just about everyone else in that orchestra. We knew when to get loud, when to get soft, when to speed up, when to slow down, all us strings knew how to, at the very least, fake our way through the ricochet bowing, and so when the conductor took us through it at the dress rehearsal, the first time we'd ever rehearsed it, we nailed it, and we nailed it again at the concert that night. It was not the most powerful musical experience I've ever had, but it was up there.
I went to NYC for Veteran's Day that year, and paid a visit to Ground Zero. I got withing two blocks of the hole. This was two months to hte day after the towers fell. I saw the impromptu memorials attached to the fence at St. Paul's cathedral. I saw the workers coming in, the most exhausted people I've ever seen. I saw a building with its side blown off and girders exposed, all twisted. It made me think of entrails. I saw a shop window, with shoes on display. All the shoes were silvery grey. At first I thought it was the latest fashion, but then I realized it was just the dust. And the smell. I'll never forget the smell. I'd heard about it on the news, days after the towers came down, that the place stank. Well, two months later, it still stank. It smelled like burned metal and death.
NYU had long since got itself back on the rails by then, but my sister didn't have internet in her dorm, and her phone service was spotty. All the communications gear for that section of Manhattan had been on top of either WTC 1 or 2.
Sorry about the brain vomit. The previous posts just made me think back to the day, and try and recall what it was like at the time.
_________________
"He attacks. And here I can kill him. But I don't. That's the answer to world peace, people."
-Stickles Shihan