It seems as if days that affect us the most involve the passing of someone. It might be horrific events like Pearl Harbor or the assassinations of President Kennedy and Dr. King. It might be images of planes flying into buildings seared into our memory by television broadcasts around the globe. It could be a sudden death of a loved one or even a death that is anticipated after a long illness.
Such days don't have to involve the passing of someone we knew or even ever met. They don't even have to mean someone passing from their corporeal form.
I know I will try to find a way to watch the last game Derek Jeter plays at Yankee Stadium this year. I know I will watch the last show David Letterman does just as I watched the last Tonight Show hosted by Johnny Carson.
I will watch the last show hosted by Craig Ferguson if only to hear him say, "It's a great day for America."
These are days that change us, change our lives, change the way we view things. The days we never forget, the days we hoped would never come, the days that cause us to smile and shed tears.
Icons and institutions that I've grown up with and learned to appreciate and love over time do that to me.
I used to tell my students a story about traveling home to Chicago to see my parents the Christmas after the first Mayor Daley died. We were driving into the city on the Eden's Expressway. As soon as we hit the city limits, I felt a sense of sorrow. My wife, who was not born and raised there as I was, turned to me and said, "Something's wrong. Something's missing."
I simply said, "Daley's gone." It was as if the entire city was in mourning.
Such days of passing affect us as individuals and collectively as a society. That's why we can all remember what we were doing, who we were with, where we were even decades later.
Thinking back to this day 13 years ago, I remember being at my classroom computer and getting a report from the AP about the World Trade Center. I think I was one of the first in the building to know about it, but the news spread quickly, and a few other teachers were able to tune their televisions to the news. Students wanted to know what was happening.
Eventually the principal made an announcement.
I know on the way home, for the first time in my life, I actually wanted to go buy a gun. I didn't. Instead, I stopped at the local driving range. Sometimes hitting something, anything, really hard and really often is a cathartic release. When I got home, I hugged my wife and children, as probably did many Americans that day.
My strongest memory of that day, the one that comes back to me on this anniversary, is that of the students I had that year. Amid the uncertainty of that day, the lack of information, the terrible nature of events, the images we all saw, they worked.
They read what they were supposed to read. They wrote what they were supposed to write. Like the firefighters and police who ran into the buildings, my students worked. They did their jobs.
They did their jobs without question.
I think, in part, that is what Kitty Donohoe has in mind when she penned this:
I was really proud of them that day. I was proud to be their teacher.
