The day before my seventh birthday, a young and perky worker at our local mall's Build-A-Bear called my mom's phone to finalize the party details. Stunned, my mom asked her if she knew what was going on at that very moment, and the worker said no. My mom hung up the phone.
She was stunned because our TV was showing her an airplane slice through the World Trade Center in New York City, about 40 miles from our home.
My dad, an officer for the New York Police Department, was at a precinct in Queens, about 10 miles from Midtown Manhattan. As a fire spread inside of the North Tower and it began to crumble 110 stories down to the ground below, my dad rushed to the scene. He worked for emergency services, which handled heavy rescue and building collapse. It was almost 9 o'clock in the morning, and he called my mom to tell her where he was going.
While my mom was carefully watching the devastation on the news that my dad was rushing to, a neighbor down the street knocked on our front door. When my mom answered, our neighbor asked if my dad was okay. Our community was already rallying together in support of my family.
At the same time, my big sister Taylor and I were at our elementary school. We knew something big had happened because all of a sudden, all of our classmates were being picked up early by their parents. No one told us why because the teachers knew many of our parents were in the police and fire departments, but gradually we were some of the only kids left in class. My mom didn't want to scare or panic us, and she thought the right thing would be to keep us in school until the regular dismissal time. She didn't realize that other parents felt differently so we sensed something in the air.
Taylor vividly remembers my mom picking us up that day and asking her why we weren't picked up early, too. Taylor wasn't afraid about our dad because he always came home later in the afternoon anyway. My mom wasn't afraid either because she had confidence in him and trusted that he would be okay.
My mom also couldn't forget that at almost seven years old, I was really looking forward to my birthday party the next day and couldn't fully comprehend what was happening. She decided to go forward with the Build-A-Bear plans, hoping that my friends' parents would still bring them.
Thankfully they did, and it was an even better day because my dad came home that next morning. With a sense of duty and caution that was more crucial than she could even know at the time, my mom made my dad change clothes outside and only wear one outfit when he was working. After washing that one outfit, she would run an empty cycle with bleach to clean the machine. She couldn't do much about his boots, which were cut up and burned on the bottom.
Over the next few weeks, my dad would go back and forth to the city to help with the rescue efforts. Whenever someone would thank him or call him a hero, he would point to the Red Cross volunteers and say they were the real heroes because they weren't getting paid for their work.
At some point during that time, my mom noticed that the words on my dad's pass to get through the Midtown Tunnel changed from "rescue" to "recovery". That subtle shift weighed on her heart because she knew the significance of those words.
I don't remember much of that time, but I do remember going to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade that November. I was too little to know that we got those Grandstand tickets because of my dad's hard work, but I wasn't too little to hold my parents' hands and soak in the magic of that day.
Looking back on 9/11, my dad doesn't think of the dust and sweat that covered him as he worked to rescue the people he shared a city with. Instead, he says, "The thing that I'll never forget is the sadness of knowing the friends I worked with were in the Towers trying to save people, and knowing they were not able to get out. Even as we dug, in the back of our minds we knew they couldn't possibly have survived it."
