Where Were You?

On April 4, 1968, a Gilligan’s Island rerun shorted out on my mother’s television screen. The Professor and Mary Ann disappeared, and Walter Cronkite took their place. Stony-faced, he made an announcement: Martin Luther King, Jr., was dead.

A little over 33 years later—and 13 years ago today—on September 11, 2001, the elementary school principal strode into my second-grade class, grave as Cronkite, and whispered in my teacher’s ear. Soon after, we filed into the room next door to hear the news. If we had looked out the window as we passed, we would have seen smoke rising across the Potomac.

My mother was 10 years old when King was shot. When the Pentagon burned and the Twin Towers fell, I was eight.

“Where were you when…?”

Any of my mom’s friends could fill in the blank and answer that question. Any of mine could, too. The events were different, but the feeling was the same—and so is our ability even today narrate that minute, those two minutes, that half an hour, with the kind of clarity that almost always eludes the pre-teen brain. But not that day.

Some of our lucidity comes from the shock of the moment itself. The brain diffuses chemicals throughout our body when something horrible happens (and we knew something horrible had happened, just like we knew we were too young to understand it); the mind makes the memory stick.

We also remember because no one would let us forget.

My mother remembered every time she passed the gutted buildings lining 14th Street in downtown D.C.—a city “too dangerous” for the school bus to drive in and pick her up—or when she saw from her bedroom window the fires raging just blocks away.

And I remembered every time I slipped off my shoes at the airport, every time I saw a yellow ribbon on the bumper of an SUV, and every time I glimpsed the gory gap in the New York skyline from the backseat of my family’s car on I-95. Others weathered pat-downs at those same airports because they were brown, or bore ribbons on their own cars because their siblings fought overseas, or saw something worse than missing buildings because the wounded city—and those who lost their lives there—belonged to them.

A few anniversaries have passed since we stopped holding moments of silence on September 11. Perhaps the wound has lost its rawness. But the scar remains. And even as the date means less and less every year, it’s every day the attack makes a difference. It affects us in ways large and small, practical and emotional. It drew the contours of our childhoods. While it’s up to us fill in the space between those lines, we’ll always remember where we were then: It’s part of who we are now.

What about who we will be? To my kids, September 11 will seem little more than a date in a history book, just like the day of King’s assassination does to me. They’ll learn its significance, but they won’t feel it. All the same, it matters. It matters because, by shaping my mother and her generation, April 4 also shaped me and mine. So did September 1 of 75 years ago, when bells across Europe signaled to my grandmother a world at war once again.

Each of us might remember where we were in one moment, but it’s scores of others that got us there. As today’s world slips further and further into chaos, we ought to take those past moments as lessons. Maybe they can help us make future ones a little less painful.

Molly L. Roberts ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an English concentrator in Cabot House.