On 9/11, ‘We held hands’

Portions of this originally published in the South County Times Sept. 8, 2006, on the 5th anniversary of 9/11. This version was written Sept. 11, 2016:

As my dad tells the story, he remembers a Sunday afternoon when he was 7, with his parents playing cards in the front room of his family’s north St. Louis flat.

Suddenly, his dad called him into the room and threw him a dime. “Go buy a paper!” his dad said, as the newsboy on the corner was shouting “EXTRA! EXTRA!”

The date: Dec. 7, 1941.

That’s how breaking news was disseminated 75 years ago. And as he has told over the years the story of how his family learned of the bombing of Pearl Harbor – a day that changed America forever – it was the details that he remembered that I remember: An afternoon card game. Neighbors in the front parlor. A shouting newsboy.

Details. We always remember the details.

And so now I recall a Tuesday morning 15 years ago. I’m a stay-at-home mom taking care of my boys, my two lovely boys. Matt, 7, had just been picked up by his second-grade carpool, and Jack, 4, was eating Cheerios at the kitchen table before preschool. I had promised Jack we would walk that day, in just his second week at the new place. And why not? Southminster Presbyterian is located only two blocks away — four-tenths of a mile — and it is a beautiful, crisp September morning.

And once Matt was picked up, the morning went like this: I’ve got one hand on a coffee cup, the other on a newspaper. I’ve got one eye on the baseball standings, and one ear on a small TV in the corner of the kitchen and NBC’s “Today” show. Jack is seated next to me, in a booster seat he’s thisclose to not needing anymore. It’s just before 8 a.m., CDT, and Matt Lauer and Katie Couric are bantering about … something.

That’s when I hear semi-familiar NBC “Breaking News” music and look up from the paper to see the infamous plume of smoke trailing from one of the towers of the World Trade Center. At first, Matt and Katie treat it as a curiosity, speculating about a small plane. But it’s a freakish enough accident to get me out of my chair and turn the volume up.

A few minutes later, the second plane hits, in full view of a nation, a mom in a kitchen, and her four-year-old eating Cheerios. That’s where we were, as a songwriter would ask a few months later, when the world stopped turning.

‘You promised’

My oh my, has it been 15 years? You remember your own details just like I remember Cheerios, baseball standings and walking my four-year-old to preschool. “Maybe we should drive today,” I gently suggested. “No mom, I want to walk,” he said. “You promised.”

I had indeed. I didn’t want to leave the news reports, but I had to get him away from TV. I had to get him to school.

This was still early in the day, before the Pentagon would be hit, before the skies would be cleared of planes, before the two towers would fall as easily as a stack of a 4-year-old’s blocks. But we left the house on that 8-minute walk to Southminster, and we held hands the entire way. Somehow, I knew I didn’t want to let go.

He’s a sophomore in college now, a member of the last class of kids who could possibly have any memory of that day 15 years ago. That’s quite a burden for his generation to carry, but something tells me they will shoulder it well.

Over the years, when asked by teachers and others if he remembered anything about that day, Jack would say, “I remember watching planes crash into a building. I remember walking to preschool. I remember my mom crying.”

Funny thing about memory. At some point, memory stops becoming the things you actually recall and start becoming the stories you hear over and over. Jack remembers Cheerios for breakfast and a small TV in the corner of the kitchen because my oft-told recollection has become his.

It’s why we tell stories.

And so he will always remember this detail, about the 8-minute walk to preschool that followed two planes crashing into tall buildings that day:  “We held hands.”