EDITOR’S JOURNAL by John Dunphy
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Just as this week’s editorial alludes, Sept. 11, 2001, is this generation’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, this generation’s assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Ask anyone today where they were when the Twin Towers were hit, and they will be able to call up memories faster than any DVD can skip chapters.
Rider University President Mordechai Rozanski was about to give a speech in Canada. Assistant Dean of Campus Life Cassie Iacovelli was blowing up balloons for Cranberry Fest. Student Karson Langenfelder was sitting on a desk in German class.
And I was sitting under a tree at Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y., trying to come up with some sort of meaningful poem for English class. About two weeks into my junior year at the little western New York school, I was still trying to find my place somewhere far from home, all the while still trying to find my voice in scrawled words, under a shade tree accumulating acorns by the tens.
At 8:46 a.m., when the first plane hit the North Tower, I was still in a science class I fail to remember the name of, one I would drop later that month. Unlike others who were rushed in hallways, in class, to be told what had happened, ours continued as originally planned. I still think how odd it is that, while chaos was only just starting settle in, I was trying to figure out what my teacher was talking about.
By 9:02 a.m., when the second plane hit the South Tower, I grew frustrated that every line of poetry wrote sounded like retread high school junk. I made my way down the grassy hill to the campus center for a coffee.
That’s when I finally heard.
Like Assistant Dean Iacovelli, it didn’t register at first. Once it did, however, the day took on an odd haze, one of those "otherworldly" kinds of feelings, similar to how someone feels after they lose someone very close. People float. Or maybe that’s just my recollection.
I remember sitting with Scott, who lived on the same floor of my dorm, who like me was from New Jersey, closer than the 300 miles that currently separated us. We chain smoked Marlboros, chugged coffee by the sleeve, and worried not just whether we could finally get through the gridlocked phone lines to see if everyone back home was alright, but also how the day’s events might directly affect us. Would we go to war?
No one myself, my friends or family members knew anyone who died that day. There were, however, more than a couple instances later told to me where people supposed to be at the World Trade Center by 8:46 a.m. were stuck in traffic, or at the doctor’s office, or just late for work for no good reason at all. It’s funny in an ironic sort of way how things work out, or don’t work out, that way.
Five years later, far from Alfred’s bucolic campus, which had something like 75 percent of its 2,000 student on-campus population walk with candles down "Academic Alley" the next evening, I wonder what, if anything, the school did this year. While Rider’s Sept. 11 commemoration filled the chairs they had set up outside Moore Library, it’s certainly only a small portion of the school’s population, certainly far less than those Dean of Students Anthony Campbell said filled the school’s massive quad five years ago.
Allowing the pain to subside is a good thing. I wouldn’t want to have a break down at every anniversary of every negative event in my life. But as Rider student Theresa Androvett noted, we still need to remember, and acknowledge the impact that this, like any major event in history, has on a society.
I still remember the coolness of the grass, the feel of the white, college-ruled paper and pen in my hands, as I periodically tossed errant acorns down the hill. These were the moments before what I had routinely seen happening "elsewhere," in Europe, in the Middle East before real death finally came home. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that day.
John Dunphy is managing editor of The Lawrence Ledger.