Five Years

I guess every generation has that moment. You know, that cliched moment where "you never forget where you were when such and such event happened". My parents had JFK and the Challenger (though I vaguely remember that) and I have 9/11. Emotion is such a huge component in memory...the most important, actually. And the heavier the event, the heavier the emotion and the more likely the memory is to sear itself in your brain. Well, that's what 9/11 was or is...seared to my brain.

It was my first day of my first real job out of school. I was in orientation at the Jackson Madison County General Hospital. I had been hired by Pathways Behavioral Health Services to be an (let me see if I can get this right)...an "intensive family preservation specialist". So, we had two days of orientation: Monday, September 10 and Tuesday, September 11. I can remember sitting next to Ashleigh James who was a college classmate of mine and who was also in orientation that day. She told me the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane. My first thought was that it had to have been an accident. I asked, "What kind of moron accidentally hits a building?" About thirty minutes later, our speaker was interrupted by someone who whispered something in his hear. The speaker then told us that the second tower had been hit and it looked like we were under attack. He dismissed us for a few minutes while the hospital tried to figure out what steps they should take, if any, to secure the building. Ashleigh and I walked outside. It was one of those days right on the edge of summer and fall. The air was clear, but the sun was still a little warm. A nice breeze was blowing. We didn't really talk about it much...the magnitude of it wasn't on top of us, yet. I called my dad who then told me the Pentagon had been hit. During my lunch break, I went up to my church and checked on one of our friends who's husband was in PA on business. They had three children all under the age of six. He was fine, she said, but didn't know when he would get home. The weight of it started to set in. I got home that afternoon to find my wife watching one of the twenty channels that were that had been overridden by the news stations. We went to Rafferty's that night with my parents and I went to bed thinking about what would be next. Would I be drafted? Would there be more attacks? Will it ever be the same?

Five years after, it seems the same to me. Probably because I wasn't affected directly by that event. So many mistakes have been made since that day by our administration, but I can't help but wonder if it would've been different with anyone else. 9/11 changed our country and forced our hand on some awful decisions. September 11, 2006 was a day that affected me far more than it's five year old predecessor. On 9/11/06, my wife and I met at the Women's Clinic in Jackson, just three hundred yards from the hospital I was at five years earlier. We walked back into a dark room and let a lady wipe some slime on my wife's stomach and probe around the top of it with a strange looking wand. We got to see our baby's brain and kidney's. It looked at us with it's skeleton face and hollow eyes. We saw it stretch its arms and legs. And we saw that we were having a little a girl. Emotion helps sear memories to our brain...9/11 will always be a contradiction in my head.