Reflection

Ten years ago on this date, I was a high school junior at Morris Central School located in upstate New York. My class was in the middle of a social studies lesson that morning. I can still picture the classroom, and the befuddled look on the teacher's face as he reacted to whatever it was -- the telephone call or announcement or the person knocking at the door -- that caused him to turn on the TV at the back of the room around 9 a.m.


The scenes of devastation played out there, and the glass of the television set reflected a room full of teenagers who sat twisted around in their seats, wide-eyed. Like me, most of them had never set foot in New York City.

I was four days shy of turning 16. The "Big Apple" existed only as a romantic vision in my imagination. I didn't really know what "terrorism" meant.

When I got home that evening, my dad and stepmother -- who grew up in New Jersey and New York City, respectively -- sat glued to the television, unable to audibly convey the gravity of the situation, or their personal connection to that place, to the towers, and to the people they knew who were living there.

A few months later, my family moved out of the log cabin I'd grown up in, which my dad had built with his own hands on 14 acres of forest land and field, miles from any town. I'd spent my summers picking berries in the brambles by the stream next to the house, listening to bullfrogs hum and burp in our murky pond, and skipping barefoot through the trees, alone most of the time when I wasn't in school. It was a hushed, sheltered world that was populated not with television anchors talking of bombs and death or musicians rapping about drugs and sex, but with animals and literature and nature. There was safety in routine, and in not knowing about the harshness of the world.

We moved to Oneonta, where the shopping mall, the public transportation system and the more diverse population made it the most urban place I'd ever called home. 

It took some time after Sept. 11, 2001, but as our country and the world and I changed after the attack, the significance of that day began to weigh on me like it had weighed on my parents since the first tower fell. And the blanket of innocence that had surrounded me as a child -- the feeling that we were invincible to all bad things -- fell away to reveal a vulnerable core.  

The 9/11 decade has encompassed my adolescence and my entrance into adulthood: my high school and college graduations; my brief marriage to the Oneonta boy who joined the Army after the U.S. invaded Iraq, and who, in 2008, spent a year fighting there; my move from the East Coast to the West Coast and back; and the start of my career in journalism.

Today, many of my friends and coworkers call New York their home. I've come to the city as a tourist and as a journalist; I've explored Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. As of this month, I sleep in a town less than 40 miles from the World Trade Center site. There and all over the lower Hudson Valley, and in Washington and Pennsylvania, thousands of people gathered this morning to memorialize their loved ones who died in the attack, on its 10th anniversary.

Now more than ever I recognize the magnitude of their loss, and the strength we have as New Yorkers and as Americans to move forward in unity into the next decade.