Listen Here
Column By Amy Drees, Assistant Professor of Teaching in English
My husband’s birthday is September 11. The day the towers fell, the restaurant called us to say our reservations were cancelled and they were not taking new reservations until the national emergency was over. Our eldest son was a preschooler, and we did not allow him to watch any of the coverage on the advice of our pediatrician who said, for small children, every time the planes hit the towers on the television it would be as if it were new planes striking new towers. He has no memory of the event, and I often wonder if we deprived him of a cultural moment or saved him from years of nightmares.
My students were not so sheltered. When the news reached our class, we joined the rest of the people in our building in the largest lecture hall where we had a television on an old media cart. About twenty minutes after the second strike, the president of the college walked in and told everyone to go home.
When one of my students said, “Do you mean the dorm?” The president replied, “No. Your parents need you. Go home if you can and come to my house if you can’t.” He had around 35 students who spent the night in the president’s house that night.
My cousin, Banu, was the lead female dancer for Merce Cunningham. Her apartment was near Julliard and it took us three days to get a phone call through to her, not knowing how or where she was. She said she went up on the roof of her building after the first strike to see “what looked like the dark horse of the apocalypse” in the roiling smoke. She heard the second strike, sat down on the roof, and wept. Banu does not speak of it and avoids any discussion of 9/11.
