I am not writing a heartfelt thought and 911 and I’m not doing that to be disrespectful towards the event. I have been teaching 911 for 23 years to children now who are born so far after the fact and know of it with all of the information intact. The story is told so much differently from the way it was lived, and that’s the part that we can’t really convey them.
My school teaches it as part of the curriculum 911 the first week of school because that’s what it happened. And no disrespect to the event, but I feel like it should be there a day of remembrances, but not a full on lengthy lesson out of context.
We don’t learn about JFK on the day he died or D-Day on the day it happened. We learned it as part of a chronological curriculum, and in the case of JFK it may never be learned because of the breath and scope of American history is nearly impossible to cover, especially for me with one week gone one week off I work in a vocational school
Having said that I remember when I was a kid in my teachers remember where they were with JFK died. It was hard for them to convey the horror to convey the processing, and I now believe that they were continuing to process the events of that day and those people continue to because I know that 911 has been a lifelong processing for me
The thought that entered my head while driving this morning down to my father‘s to pick up something I forgot because I’m a fucking idiot. Is that when I watched the towers that day, the smoking towers with people, jumping out of them people on the top of the roofs waiting their hands, hoping to be rescued. I have lots of questions. I wondered why they weren’t being picked up by helicopter and rescued. I wondered why they couldn’t just put a big inflatable pillow at the base of the building to catch the ones that were falling.
Like I said, I’m a fucking idiot on so many levels in the moment I couldn’t process the height of those building and I didn’t quite understand cause I’m not as fast thinking or as bright as the average bear. But a coworker in the moment explained to me that they would be dead before they even came anywhere near the ground because of the height of the buildings.
And as I watched that morning, the news coverage, the people, jumping out of buildings, the windows breaking the curtains, swinging in the wind the people who were trying to make curtain ladders down the side of the building, only to fall
Not for a second did I think those buildings were gonna fall and it wasn’t until later that I learned that they were built to withstand hurricanes airplanes bombings or maybe I did know that that day and just had a difficult time processing it like I said I’m not that bright
They stood so sure of themselves so permanent. I had visited them as a child with the Girl Scouts like a cornerstone. I never imagine that they could fall until they did.
Again, I would learn later that they had picked those airplanes because the jet fuel in them bound for California would warm up by the time they got to New York City to the point or temperature of lava, which, when the planes hit the towers, they cracked open like an egg and all that jet fuel motor and lava pour down the inside of the building, weakening the trusses, causing them to fall. I did not know that the day I watched them fall.
I kind of feel like that is the way I think about things sometimes like when my mother died. She was a cornerstone. She was a pillar. She was a fighter. She was built different. She survived everything. It was in her nature. It was in her construction. There was no way that she was gonna die in a hospital bed. There was something to be done. There was something to fix her until there wasn’t.
And now I think I’m that way with my father as he stares down his own twin tower attack with his lung cancer, I have to prepare myself for my own low processing speed, naïve nature,. He is a cornerstone of strength. He is built different. He is a survivor. He is 84 years old and he has lung cancer.
I’d like to retain naïve outlook and hoping for the best we take it one step at a time and hope that this isn’t the thing that brings the towers down for him 
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