30 days and change: Day 15

DAY FIFTEEN: Write about a historical event that you lived through.

WORD COUNT: 420

Southport Elementary School, Southport, NC

When I think about one of the major historical events I’ve lived through, I will always be drawn back to 9/11 in my fifth-grade year at Southport Elementary. I don’t remember much of the day before the towers collapsed, but I assumed it was a typical Tuesday. It was a run-of-the-mill day where routine ruled, and my mother and father dashed off to work. Taking the bus to school to begin another day of learning. Just before 9 AM, the shuffle of teachers and administrators was such a panic that I can’t really describe it.

It felt like every adult in the building had an internal fire that they couldn’t put out. Causing them to run from room to room, checking on each other, making panic phone calls, and crying. Trying their best to contain their emotions to keep some sense of normalcy within the school building, we were all ushered back into our rooms, with the lights off, sitting quietly. Little did anyone know (well, maybe realized) that our school’s proximity to the East Coast's largest military ocean terminal (Sunny Point) played a significant role in how 9/11 impacted us right there at home, miles away from New York. Heightened security lined our school streets and a heightened sense of fear raised across our small town. By noon that day, schools in the county were released early to reunite families as many also spent the day and the next few weeks or so trying to locate their own loved ones displaced in the rubble and chaos in New York at ground zero.

Sunny Point Terminal Entrance

My more vivid memory is the mental haze it created as we exited the bus at early release, hoping off the bus with Rose and Ervin, my childhood friends, running into our yards; it was as if the clouds felt a bit grayer, time moved a bit slower, and everyone was just stuck in an alternate reality. My mom came home during the day to check in, the phone at the house rang off the hook (yes, at that point, we still had house phones), and neighbors parallel and adjacent sprang into action to nurture their own surrounding them. Honestly, it's a bit crazy that it takes a crisis to bring folks together in the community, but that year, we all had no choice but to show up for one another. It's wild to think that so many people lost their lives in the blink of an eye, forever changing the course of our lives as Americans.