Ten years ago...

S. was in preschool and I was taking a course in the city (aka Manhattan). I dropped off her carpool and drove to my bus stop as usual, to take the 9:00 or 9:10 to Port Authority followed by the subway to my school.

As I drove, I put on the radio to check the traffic. But instead I heard the news. Unbelievably, I got out of the car and went o wait for my bus anyway, as did about twenty other people, until a bus came in the opposite direction and informed us that Manhattan was closed and we should all go home.

I spent the rest of the morning glued to the TV and radio simultaneously. My husband worked in the city at a company that had affiliates in the towers, and I have a close relative that worked near the Pentagon. Cell service was insane, so it was hard to reach them, but I did. He did make it home that night, eventually.

As much as I wanted to just hug little baby M. when I got home from the bus stop, I let him stay at the park with his babysitter rather than spend the morning with a frantic mother. I went and got him when S. was sent home early from school, partly because of security concerns for known Jewish institutions. A week later, on Rosh Hashanah, there were police cars all over our neighborhood patrolling to keep an eye on the shuls (synagogues).

This past Friday, S. came home from school with a list of questions and an assignment to do an oral history project with her parents and relatives regarding 9/11. She was in pre-school then. She's in middle school now. A lot has happened in those ten years. Yet when I sat with her to tell her about the day, it all came back.

What do you remember most, she asked? Feeling frantic, because things kept happening. One tower hit, then two, then the Pentagon, then maybe an explosion in DC that turned out not to have happened, then a tower collapses, then a plane crashes that was meant for the white house or the capitol, then the other tower collapses. And then a week later, when we begin to catch our breath between sobs, anthrax in the mail.

And it stuck, for a long time. For weeks, we could see the smoke. Months later, there was DNA evidence for our friend and there was a memorial And later that year, I attended a dinner at Terrace in the Park, a hall in Queens that extends up into the air and is walled by floor to ceiling windows. It is also near two airports, and every time I saw a plane, I got scared.

What did you learn from 9/11? That the world is not a safe place, anywhere. I knew it in my head, but it didn't apply to me, here until then. Not until I felt the fear, lived through it, lost someone I knew pretty well. Girls my age weren't supposed to be widows, especially like that.

May we not know from things like this in the future. May our kids continue to ask us questions, because it's history to them and they can't relate. May the lion lie down with the lamb.