It was the second week of classes at St. Patrick School in Bay Shore. I remember sitting in Mrs. Canonico’s eighth grade English class when the principal’s voice came over the loud speaker asking that everyone take a moment of silence. I remember thinking that I must have forgotten some religious holiday, or a ‘this day in history’ lesson.
Sadly, I hadn’t.
After the moment of silence, our principal Ms. Quinn led us in a prayer before teachers were told to go back to their duties.
They didn’t tell us that the World Trade Center and Pentagon were just attacked. They didn’t tell us that thousands were just killed. They didn’t tell us all of New York City was in complete chaos.
There was no Facebook, no Twitter. The attacks predated YouTube and even texting. Unless a teacher told us something, we were totally in the dark about the outside world between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.
As word spread among faculty members, the atmosphere in the hallways changed. It went from the usual upbeat September tone to a somber one like I had never experienced before.
Students periodically were pulled from class and went home — either their parents worked in or near the World Trade Center, or their parents were too afraid to leave them in school.
My friends and I talked about what it could be. I can’t remember now what some of our theories were, but I do remember that an attack on New York City never crossed our 13-year-old minds.
My bus driver, Pasquale, told me what happened. I got on the bus and the first thing I said to him was “Hola.” He and I practiced Spanish together because it was my first year taking the class. I asked him, “What happened today?”
“They bombed the twin towers,” said the usually jovial bus driver.
What seemed like seconds later Ms. Quinn came up to the driver’s-side door and told him “They don’t know what happened today. Don’t tell them.”
He agreed and we left. I was happy I had asked him before she had made her way to the bus. He didn’t say anything more about it, although I volunteered a promise not to tell anyone he told me.
When I got home I put on my T.V. I didn’t know much about the news then, but it didn’t matter. It was the same thing on every channel. Images of explosions, like in a movie, filled my afternoon.
At some point, my best friend, Derek Santo, called my house to see if I had seen the news. He and I probably spent about 10 minutes on the phone, though we didn’t say much, we just watched.
“Well, happy birthday to me,” he said. It was his 14th birthday and his sarcastic words were the only ones either one of us was able to come up with. We hung up moments later.
My television in those days was a white TV/VCR combo unit. For a reason I still don’t know today, I popped a new tape in, set it for SLR so I would get six hours out of it and hit record. I repeated this a few times throughout the week.
The next year I started high school, invigorated with passion for video. I had fallen in love with the idea of putting cameras in people’s faces and capturing moments so I could share them with the world. The first time I ever let anyone see my work was after I finished a 9/11 memorial video for my sophomore theology class. It was definitely soft and had a clear bias, but watching hours and hours of the tapes from that day taught me the power of a sound bite.
I pulled bites and images from different pieces of the newscasts then crawled the web looking for photos related to the attacks. Man, was Google tough in those days. I struggled with a song choice, with images, and I went through every detail of the attacks so I could spell them out in the video. I didn’t know it then, but I was reporting.
My classmates sat in silence as they watched it. Some cried a little, others just stared blankly. A loud applause followed my presentation and I went home with an addiction to storytelling.
I didn’t lose anybody in the towers, and I didn’t know anybody in the towers, but still, the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 changed my life. You can probably figure out how.
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