I was in 7th grade on 9/11.
Dispatch from New York City.
I was reading a stark, emotionless bullet-pointed list from a news source on the events of September 11th, which read ‘Two planes were crashed into the Twin Towers’, when the emotions and images came flooding back.
My memories of that sunny early September morning are in a grey monotone as if covered in ash, perhaps from watching too much footage of the attack.
I was in 7th grade at a Queens middle school, in Mr. Silver’s science class, when rumors began circulating that a plane hit a skyscraper. At lunch, panic among the staff was obvious and parents hurriedly picked up their kids. My mother arrived and we drove to pickup my brother at his elementary school. We waited for him to report to the school office where I heard fear and uncertainty in the staff’s voices. In the car on the way home the radio reported that another plane had hit the Pentagon. I understood that this was an attack but not why or how. From our street I saw smoke rising from lower Manhattan, ash slowly falling like snow in our backyard, and heard the roar of fighter jets. In the basement away from the watchful eye of Mom, my brother and I flipped on the television. We saw people covered white with dust running down smoke and debris-filled streets. Unrecognizable as Manhattan, this footage looked like a movie. The towers had collapsed. Our father was working in the city, we weren’t sure where. It was afternoon by the time he was able to find a working phone to let us know he was safe. The television showed a burning, smoking pit of rubble where the towers had once stood.
In my oral history interviews with New Yorkers everyone who was present in the city that day has a story to share. In the following weeks, months and years, 9/11 became a part of our identity, as Americans and as New Yorkers, always fresh in our hearts and minds.
My thoughts are with the families who lost their loved ones.
Keith Walpole
9.11.25
New York, NY