never forget

I was at the gym when it happened.

When they first broke in on the radio with the news, someone said, "they've got it wrong. It couldn't have been a 747. It must have happened at 7:47 a.m." Then the radio went back to playing music and we all went back to our workouts.

When the next plane hit, there would be no more music that day. A dozen or more sweating people stopped lifting weights, got off the treadmills and bikes, and stood together at one side of the room looking up at the stereo speakers on the wall, listening to the events unfold.

When the Pentagon was hit, there was fear that there were more hijacked planes, as many as five or six in the air. That was when I ran home.

I arrived just in time to see the towers fall. To hear the reports of another attempt thwarted by heroic passengers over Pennsylvania. To see my father, a native New Yorker, watch his city on fire from his adopted New England home.

At the time I taught saxophone lessons in a Manchester, NH studio that was right below the landing route for the international airport. In the still warm month of September I taught with my windows open. The roar of plane engines was absent for the week that followed.

America came together that day. I've never experienced it any other time in my life. People cared. Millions donated money, thousands traveled to the devestation to help secure the site. To participate in the autopsy. People held hands, hugged. We were united.

We got on with our music, our lives. And the plane engines returned. And it seems that some have begun to forget.

I hope I'm wrong.

I'll always remember.