I was born on Long Island during the summer of 1981. For those of you who don’t know anything about Long Island I will tell you that the name is rather fitting because it is, in fact, a very long island that is sprawled across west to east just off the coast of the state of New York. I spent the early years of my life living on Long Island before moving to Port Richey Florida in 1989.
Having lived in New York was nothing that ever truly defined me, I was young and to be honest I have a rather crummy memory for things that happened when I was younger. Unless it is a memory of something that I had done with my family, its pretty much gone. In fact when people ask me where I’m from I tend to blurt out Florida without so much as a second thought to it. I’ve spent so much time here in this state . . .
Of the time I did spend in New York very little of it was actually spent in the big city. Sure we went to the Museum of Natural History when I was a kid (to see the big dinosaur skeletons) and we went to Rockefeller Center and Macy’s during Christmas time to see the big tree and go ice skating, but my fondest memories of New York are not from the big city they are from the island. I was born on an island and raised on a peninsula, is there really any wonder to how I came to be the way I am? I remember summers at Robert Moses and Jones Beach, I remember walking through the Bayard Cutting Arboretum, Argyle Lake, and fishing from my grandfather’s boat. I remember walking through the fields across the street from my aunt and uncle’s on the north shore and I remember many a times walking through the old historic general store. Of course life on the island was not complete without knowing the full history of “Stumpy” a fictional character or should I say ghost of a Civil War soldier that lost his arm and searched for it at night . . . a character that my family developed for a rather gullible child, myself. This was the New York that I remembered. Not the concrete jungle of sidewalks and huge glass skyscrapers and certainly not the train rides from the island to the city. As I struggle to remember . . . I cannot even think of a time where I was ever inside the World Trade Center or even the Statue of Liberty for that matter. My family doesn’t recall a time either and so I think it is rather safe to say that I have never been to either. I was not, and am not, a city girl.
My memory of the World Trade Center is a vague one. I remember being about 8 or 9 and driving to New York to spend Christmas with my relatives. I remember driving past and through the city at night time and my parents pointing to two large buildings that were called the “twin towers.” This was something that was repeated on every driving trip that we took between New York and Florida. This is what I knew of the World Trade Center. Of course it was on the news all of the time, and every picture of New York City was nearly defined by the two tall buildings, but I knew virtually nothing of it. Who cared? It was a set of big buildings . . . they were built by people . . . it was not a big deal.
When I was in the sixth grade my family returned to Long Island, New York and we lived there for sixth months. I remember coming home from school one day and every news station, actually probably every TV station period, had the World Trade Center plastered all over it. The first terrorist attack on the buildings had just taken place and I was living in the state to watch history unfold. I was so young . . . that I didn’t think twice about it. We spent days talking about it in Social Studies and I being young and naïve couldn’t wait to get back to our lectures about ancient Egypt instead. To me they were still just buildings . . . nothing as grand as the natural world that I had come to love. Just big boring structures.
Many years later, during September of 2001, I found myself living in another city, not quite as big as New York, but a sprawling city nonetheless. The city was Orlando, and I hated that city too. The University of Central Florida had become my home away from home as I spent hours and hours there. If I wasn’t in a classroom, I was in one of the many Radio Television or film facilities, or maybe at work in undergraduate admissions, or perhaps more likely pleading with my editing computer in my video office for the Campus Activities Board.
September 11, 2001 started too early. I had classes in the afternoon and work in the morning and of course, I was running late. I had agreed to pick up my best friend at the time, Jimmie Hannaman, and drive him to work that morning too. UCF was different back then, it was not as big as it was now. We both worked for the Campus Activities Board for one job and then we each held other on campus jobs. To be honest driving together made sense, but how exactly I got suckered into driving that day, was beyond me. He was running late that morning too so I sat in the living room of the apartment. I was not in the mood for silence and so I popped on the television. The news was on . . . it was on for every channel, and the image was the same. There was the World Trade Center and coming from one of the towers was a plume of dark smoke. Then the news cut to an image of the Pentagon. The context was very much the same. The reporters kept saying the same thing over and over . . . “a fire in the courtyard of the pentagon building . . . a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.” At that point Jimmie emerged ready to leave and we turned off the TV and headed for the car. We were so clueless as to the days events.
I remember the car ride to the university rather vividly that day. We were running late and even though the University was only a few blocks up the road we managed to hit every red light between the apartments and the school. Figures. We chatted about the news and the statistical probability of both buildings (pentagon and world trade center) being damaged in a similar manner in the same time frame. We both agreed that it was highly unlikely . . .we really had no clue.
I walked into work in Undergraduate Admissions five minutes late that morning. I loved the people that I worked with but I hated that job. The mountains and mountains of paperwork that I had to code or file. It was so monotonous and boring. That morning the office had a completely different feel to it. Actually the entire administration building did . . . the halls were empty and it was rather silent. I walked into the office where I worked and instead of being greeted by the typical banter of the other women that worked there and the sounds of fingers pounding on the computer’s keyboards there was a silence except for the TV on which the news was playing. Except for an occasional “oh my god” the office was quite silent. No one noticed that I was late. I joined the crowd around the small TV and it was only a matter of minutes before I realized what had really happened. Jimmie’s and my conversation . . . “that has to be a terrorist attack” . . . was a reality, and I watched the television as the news replayed the footage of the planes flying into the buildings over and over again. We were all dumbfounded. After a few minutes I managed to pry myself away from the TV. I was beginning to think of the repercussions that this momentous occasion could possibly have and I also entertained the thought that the attack might not be over. I lived in tourist central and at that point there was so much speculation that there was, at least in our young minds, the thought of “would it come here?” I called my roommate and went to the ATMs, at this point everyone was still sitting dumbfounded in front of a TV but I was sure that within and hour or so mass panic would ensue. I returned to work but within a matter of just a few more minutes left for an extremely early lunch . . . no one was working anyway. After picking up lunch we (Jimmie and I) walked up the Student Union’s winding staircase to head to the Office of Student Activities, home of the Campus Activities Board and the office where I worked with many of my friends. As we climbed the staircase we saw the student union workers scrambling to set up projector screens and projectors. The news had spread like wildfire and the once bright and sunny day had become incredibly somber.
Everybody that worked in OSA was in our board room the TV in the corner, tuned to the news, just like every TV in the entire university. I took some time to call my mother. I knew that some of my relatives worked in the city, but to be honest I couldn’t remember where. I didn’t know if they were anywhere near the buildings. To her knowledge nobody was there. We were wrong. We took our seats amongst everyone else and ate our lunch in the boardroom, watching the TV discussing the events with our peers and our advisers. Of course to add to the chaos we had a show scheduled for that evening. I believe it was a speaker and if memory serves me correctly it was someone from the Real World, and the poor person was stranded somewhere in an airport in some part of the country trying to figure out exactly what was going on much as we were at that moment. We watched the towers fall.
An hour passed. I tried to pry myself away to return to work, but I couldn’t. Nobody really could. If you walked to the promenade of the second floor of the student union and looked down into the atrium you could see a massive mess of people, staring dumbfounded at the events being projected onto the screen. It was clear that everything, lie as we knew it at that time, had just stopped. Word came down a short time later that classes were canceled and the University was shutting down for the day.
I left work and CAB and headed home. I turned on the TV and it played all day long. I didn’t even turn it off when I went to bed. I just watched as the events continued to unfold. It was surreal and I, as many people I’m sure did that day, wondered how everything in our life was going to change and I remember saying to myself that “things were going to change, so much was never going to be the same again.”
In talking to my family I found out that my cousin’s husband was on temporary duty in the World Trade Center that day. They were doing work in the basement. He was one of the lucky ones. Being so close to the ground level, is part of what allowed him to escape. The images that were described to me . . . the things that he witnessed . . . were horrible and unbelieveable. I have never myself talked to him about it, nor do I ever care to. There are just some images that people should not be reminded of . . . and those images are among them.
My poor cousin was a school teacher in Brooklyn at the time. She watched everything unfold with her fourth graders through the windows as they looked across the bay. I can’t imagine the terror. She knew that her husband was there . . . and how many of her students had parents in those buildings? What do you do when that happens? Its unthinkable.
The next day my friend Christie approached me. “I’m doing a package for the Knightly News,” she said, “You’re from New York, will you go on the camera and say a few things.” And so I did, my first of many appearances on the Knightly News, talking about a place I had a kinship too solely because of my relatives that lived there. I suppose I didn’t make the best of an interviewee. I had never been in the buildings myself and I was not a big city person, but I had relatives in New York, I had relatives in the city and I had a different perspective on it than some people. However, there were many students in our university that lost family members, in the pentagon and in the Trade Center. There were many others that had very fond memories of vacation time physically spent in the buildings . . . Jimmie and Steve being the two that come to mind. In many ways I just couldn’t relate except to realize that things in our life were about to change because the events had set into motion an almost extraordinary set of events that continue to affect us even today . . . 5 years later.
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