Twenty-five years ago today, I thought my sister-in-law was calling to tell me that our lives had changed because my children had started school.
In a way, she was right.
It was September 11, 2001. I had just dropped my son and daughter off for their first day of pre-K and was returning home when I heard my sister-in-law’s voice on the answering machine.
“Today is the day our lives are being changed forever.”
I picked up the phone in the middle of her message.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” she said.
I asked, “Them going to school?”
“No,” she said. “The plane going into the Trade Center. Turn on your TV.”
I did.
Smoke was pouring from one of the towers.
I immediately turned around and headed back to the children’s school in Leonardo, New Jersey, roughly 40 miles across the water from Lower Manhattan. Along the way, I listened to the radio as the reports became increasingly horrifying.
Then came the news that a second plane had hit the other tower.
By the time I reached the school, parents were beginning to arrive. The children were in a short pre-K program that morning, and no one knew whether they would be sent home early.
The adults knew something terrible was happening.
The children did not.
I remember walking toward the inlet and watching one of the towers collapse.
I remember the surreal feeling of standing there, watching something that seemed impossible.
And then, at 11 a.m., the children came out of school.
They were smiling.
The parents were not.
Everyone tried to smile back. We tried to preserve the joy of their first day of school, even as we were struggling to comprehend what was happening only miles away.
And then my daughter Ashley walked out carrying a paper plate.
It had a happy face drawn on it.
On the back of it were the words:
“Ashley had a great day. September 11, 2001.”
I still have that paper plate.
For 25 years, those words have carried an irony that a four-year-old could never have understood.
Ashley really did have a great day.
She didn’t know that thousands of people were losing their lives. She didn’t know that the country she had been born into was being attacked. She didn’t know that the adults around her were frightened or that the world we were sending her into had suddenly become different.
She only knew that she had gone to school.
She had made it through her first morning.
She had a happy face on a paper plate.
And maybe that innocence was exactly what she needed that day.
In the years that followed, we would learn to live with new realities. Airports would change. Security would become part of everyday life. Public places would feel different. An entire generation would grow up knowing September 11 not as something they remembered, but as something they were taught.
For those of us who were adults that morning, however, September 11 isn’t something we learned about.
It is something we lived.
We remember where we were.
We remember who called us.
We remember the television.
We remember the smoke.
We remember the second plane.
We remember the moment the towers disappeared.
And we remember the people who didn’t come home.
Twenty-five years later, my daughter is a grown woman. She has no personal memory of that first day of school. Her understanding of September 11 comes from history, photographs, stories and the memories of people who were there.
But I have the paper plate.
And every time I see it, I think about the extraordinary contrast contained in those few words.
Ashley had a great day.
On a day when America experienced one of its darkest moments, a four-year-old girl experienced one of the simplest joys of childhood.
She went to school.
She came home smiling.
She had no idea that history had just happened around her.
There is something profoundly comforting about that.
The people who died on September 11 never got to come home. They never got to watch their children grow up, celebrate birthdays, attend graduations or experience the ordinary moments that make up a life.
We owe them more than remembrance.
We owe them the commitment to appreciate the ordinary days they never got to have.
So I look at that paper plate differently now.
It isn’t just a child’s craft from the first day of pre-K.
It is a snapshot of innocence frozen in time.
It is a reminder of how quickly life can change.
And it is a reminder that while history was unfolding around her, my four-year-old daughter was simply being a four-year-old.
She didn’t know America was afraid.
She didn’t know the world had changed.
She only knew that she had gone to school.
And according to the paper plate she carried home that morning—
Ashley had a great day.
Twenty-five years later, that may be the part of September 11 I treasure most.
