The illogical ways that 9/11 changed my life:
Tuesday September 11, 2001 –
It was one week into my junior year of high school. My radio alarm clock went off in the morning at the usual time (I don’t recall exactly what time that was but I think it was at about 5:30, since I liked to get down to the school early and hang out with my friends in the cafeteria and be mildly mischievous every morning for about an hour before classes started). The usual goofy morning DJs had a more serious tone as they spoke about an “incident” on the east coast, in which a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. This jerks me awake much more rapidly that the morning radio usually did (it as often as not took over an hour of music and DJ banter to roust me from bed towards my morning shower). I went upstairs to my step-dad’s office and told him to turn on the news, that something was going on in New York. I went back downstairs and turned on the TV. After a bit of news footage that has since blurred together in my mind, I saw the second plane hit the second tower. I saw it happen; I watched it live on the news feed. I had a hard time wrapping my head around it at the time; I was only 16, and even though I had already traveled abroad a couple of times in my life (including two weeks in war-torn West Bank and Israel), I didn’t really know how to interpret what was going on. I knew it was bad, I knew that it was going to be highly traumatic for those involved and all that, but I had not idea at the time the impact that it would have on me two days later. More news footage (presumably related to the pentagon and the other plane that the passengers took down, I don’t really recall, as well as footage of the first tower collapsing which I do remember blurrily), then I eventually pulled myself away to get back into routine; I took a shower and headed down to school. Classes were basically split into three categories: the teachers who tried to go on with their lesson like nothing had happened, the teachers who spent the class time discussing what was happening, and the teachers who’d gotten a hold of one of the school’s TVs and wheeled it into the classroom and just spent the period watching the news. After school, I took the bus (I always had monthly passes due to my high school’s lack of school busses) out to my best friend and boyfriend’s apartment for the afternoon (very convenient for me that they lived together – I met one through the other; this grungy pit was dubbed by me as Paradise in a reference to the Green Day song “Welcome to Paradise” about a really shitty apartment in Oakland), and we all watched as the news came out about air raids on Afghanistan, that al Qaeda had claimed responsibility for the attacks and their ties to the Afghani government of the Taliban. During the prior year, I had spent some time studying the Taliban government for Model U.N., and I was just fine with us bombing them back to the stone age for their social injustices unrelated to the day’s attacks. Eventually, as the evening wore on, I went home and had a little interaction with my parents. I was instructed not to discuss the national events with my little sister, that they (my parents) were easing into it gently with her, as she was only my foster sister and had only been with us for about a month following about two years in a treatment program. I grudgingly agreed not to bring it up around her and wandered off to bed.
Wednesday September 12, 2001 –
This day was more usual; the morning DJs played music while not really making many jokes; classes took place with some current events debates but a lot more curriculum than the day prior; and after school I went over to Paradise. Again we spent the afternoon watching the news, and eventually I headed back home. I kept my mouth shut about all the turmoil going on in our country, and metaphorically bit my tongue through dinner before retreating to my bedroom, feeling very, very, very, very conflicted about what was going on in both my home and the country.
Thursday September 13, 2001 –
The alarm went off; I heard it and ignored it. The music (as it was still too soon for the DJs to return to their typical banter) played for the pre-programmed two hours, then turned itself off. For the final several months of the prior school year, this was a fairly common occurrence; I had some pretty severe problems with dysthymia and depression, and often lacked the motivation to even get out of bed in the morning. The apathy had led to severely poor grades and academic progress, as well as leaving me with a pretty poor quality of life. Sometime around when school was due to start, my mom came into my room, quite flustered that I was repeating what she/we had worked so hard over the summer to overcome – my debilitating depression. She told me a wide variety of things that all meant “get out of bed and go to school.” I continued to ignore her, as I had ignored the radio, and remained in bed. She eventually ran out of things to motivate me with, and told me that she was going to call my dad; that I could go live with him, she was done fighting this fight on too many mornings to count. I knew that she wouldn’t reach him; she didn’t have his cell phone number, and I knew that he was outside Astoria helping a musician friend of his set up for the annual Blues by the Sea festival – this would be that festival’s third year. I heard her go try to make the call, not reach him, then come back into my room and remark that I needed to go to school or I could “just get out of here.” I continued to stay curled up in bed, ignoring the world around me that was moving too fast for me to follow. At some point I got out of bed (probably in the early afternoon, but I don’t remember for sure), and I was again threatened by my mother with “do X or you can just get out.” This time, I don’t remember what the X was, but it was likely something trivial; I just don’t remember, so I can’t be sure. I returned to my room to hide away for the rest of the day. Around 9-ish at night I came out of my room and went upstairs and asked my mom that since my little sister was already in bed asleep, if it would be ok for me to watch the nightly news; I was told some variation of “no.” About this time my older sister called the house from college in California, and my step-dad was on phone in the kitchen, next to the living room where my mother and I began to argue. I asked in a huff if I could watch them with the sound off and closed captions turned on, so that I could find out what was going on (this was still only TWO days after the biggest (and only as far as I’m concerned, since Hawaii wasn’t a state at the time of Pearl Harbor) attack on US soil since the Civil War (and don’t start in with me on conspiracy theories of if it was really an “attack;” that was completely irrelevant that early into the aftermath; we were still looking for survivors, not evidence)). Again, for reasons that I still to this day do not understand, I was told no, that that was not an option. My mother and I were raising out voices. “Why not?!” I asked her, with mixed emotions of frustration, confusion, distrust, and the sense of being manipulated for the sake of control on her part. At this point, I hear my step-dad begin to raise his voice to my sister on the phone, “Hold on a minute.” He came out into the living room, put his face directly into my face, and growled in a low and threatening tone, “You drop this argument about the damn news, you apologize to your mother, and you get your ass back downstairs, or you can just get out of here!” I stormed back downstairs without apologizing. This was the third time in a single day that I had heard the words do something “or just get out,” and this day was not the first that I’d heard it (but never at anywhere near this close of intervals). So this day I took it to heart. I went to my room, typed out an angry letter on my computer about how awful my mom and step-dad were, how much my dad was an ass and it was going to suck having to live with him, but fuck them all, I was leaving. It is still a matter of debate within the family of whether I was kicked out or ran away, but I packed my backpack full of clothes and walked out the back door, went around the house, walked the five blocks out to the bus stop on Barbur and looked to see when the next bus was due – about 50 minutes; I’d just missed it. I was fuming mad at this point, so I just began walking down Barbur towards downtown to burn off some steam. I walked about two and a half miles from my house down Barbur, and stopped at the Rasmussen Village apartment complex, beginning to run out of adrenalin-fueled indignant rage, and waited for the bus to pick me up. I rode it into downtown, used a pay-phone to call my friend’s pager to let him know I was on my way over (we were both nerds, so combined my lucky number with binary to create a pager code system for messages, as he was usually on his dial up internet and folks couldn’t get hold of the apartment directly – 50 for I’m not coming, 51 for I’m on my way, and 5911 for get-off-the-damn-internet-so-I-can-call-you-because-something’s-up), then caught the bus out to Paradise. My boyfriend was out at the time, I don’t recall doing what, but my friend convinced me that it wouldn’t be wise for them to be harboring a runaway (we didn’t really debate the point, I was still pretty much in shock-and-adrenalin mode, though burning out fast), that I should go to the youth shelter that was a few blocks down the road that he had spent some time at the year prior. He made the call; I was too shook up. Then we walked the ten blocks or so to the shelter office, where I had to spend over an hour filling out paperwork and answering intake questions.
Friday September 14, 2001 –
It was after midnight by the time I was all processed; the case guy drove me over to the actual shelter site and helped me get settled for the night by introducing me to the person who looked over the kids; he or she (I don’t recall) picked me out a bed in one of the girls’ rooms and got me a toothbrush and toothpaste. I couldn’t sleep for the longest time, but once the adrenalin finally burned out I crashed hard. In the morning I got up and took a shower and got acquainted with the other three(?) youth who were staying there at the time. I don’t remember breakfast or anything about the morning, but around lunchtime we all went to the office. I got hold of my dad’s girlfriend (now she’s my step-mom), who was already planning on picking me up and taking me out to Astoria for the festival, and got her up to date on where I was (my mom must have in fact eventually got hold of my dad sometime in the night and filled him in on my absence, and it seemed to me that he had filled her in on the basics); we made arrangements for her to pick me up, and she spoke with the case guy at the office to verify this with him. I don’t really remember a lot about that afternoon, other than everyone was walking on eggshells; we were avoiding the elephant in the room. One of the acts performing that evening was a young up-and-coming blues guitarist and his similarly young and talented bassist. The guitarist and I hit it off; he was a year younger than me, and it started the joke that runs to this day that I was the youngest groupie he’d met (most of the audience were in their 40s or 50s). He invited me to come out to the jam session that he and several of the other guys were doing that night at one of the bars in town; at first my dad said no, but after talking to the band’s manager (who happened to be the bassist’s dad), he agreed to let me go out and hang out with them in their “tour bus” while they weren’t playing, and listen from OUTside the bar while they jammed. The bus was parked right on the coast; we were on the road, next to it there was a barrier blocking access to a hill of rocks, with the ocean lapping up at them. I remember that it was a VERY welcome distraction to all the chaos that had been going on in the world and my personal life over the past few days. Stars, waves, dead fish smells… All of it was welcome at that point. After the jam, I was returned to my dad’s backstage campsite safe and sound.
Saturday September 15, 2001 –
I spent the day listening to some of the Pacific Northwest’s best blues acts. I spent a little time backstage, a little time wandering around the campground that the event was held at, and eventually ended up spending some more time with that young blues guitarist. He stole a few kisses, which I both appreciated for their flattery and distraction, but also felt somewhat guilty about (I told my boyfriend about it after the fact, and he forgave me for the minor indiscretion at such a tumultuous time in my life).
Sunday September 16, 2001 –
It was time to face the elephant in the room… My dad told me that I was and always will be welcome with him (at that point in my life, I hadn’t lived with him full-time since my parents divorced when I was five; I’d spent every other weekend at his house for those eleven years, and usually a week or so in the summer on vacation with him, but never lived there since I went away with my mom). I accepted his offer tentatively; I still didn’t know what I wanted, how I wanted it all to play out… I just didn’t know. There was too much chaos and confusion. I didn’t know if my mom/step-dad could forgive me leaving or if they were pleased to have me gone, I didn’t know what life could be like with my dad (my mom always had a lot of bad stuff to say about him, and I hadn’t spent enough time with him to develop strong opinions of my own).
Monday September 17, 2001 –
In the morning, I was rousted from bed by my dad instead of the more familiar radio alarm, and I got ready for school. My dad drove me all the way into town to my high school, and I still had my bus pass to get me back to his house in the afternoon. That day is a blur. I remember talking to some of my closer friends about what was happening, but I don’t recall what anyone’s input was. That day I was in a fog. On my way back to my dad’s, on a whim, I pulled the cord a few stops early and got off in front of the local high school. I had not set foot in that building since I was in the second grade doing an afterschool dance program with the high school dance team. I went into the office; classes had long been let out, and there was minimal staffing there. I got a secretary’s attention and said something to the effect of, “Umm, I’m thinking about transferring here. Can I, uh, have a list of classes that are offered here?” She rummaged for a few minutes, then produced a school catalog for me. I thanked her and walked the few blocks further to my dad’s. “Why had I just done that?”, I was asking myself. As I searched my mind, I realized that I had already made my decision – I was going to move in with my dad and change schools. This was set in my mind by the time I got home – for that’s what it had so abruptly become: not my dad’s house, but home. We talked it over that night; I don’t recall the exact points of the conversation, but we made a plan to take care of it all in the morning. I looked through the class book, and was pleased to find that they had a Japanese program at this high school too; I was afraid that my two-year investment into the subject at my prior high school might go to waste. I went to bed feeling good; things were about to change in my life, in so many ways that I could not foresee.
Tuesday September 18, 2001 –
One week after the attacks, I got up on time. My dad and I again made the drive across town, but this time he came in with me. We went to the office and told them that I was withdrawing from the school and that I would be transferring. They pulled up my transcripts, printed them out, sealed them up all official-like, withdrew me from my classes’ rosters and sent us on our way. We drove back down to the high school just a few blocks from my dad’s house, and went it to the office there. I remember being really anxious about it all before the guidance councilor met us; I had the class book in hand, with the pages marked of all the classes I had been in at my old school, and the electives I would like to take if some classes were full. At my prior school, the class load was six full-year classes, with the option of taking a “zero-period” class early in the morning. At the new school, the class load was two terms of four classes; this technically left me two credits short of “junior” standing at the new school, but they enrolled me as such anyway; it wasn’t my fault the systems were different, and I was informed that I would just have to take full loads and not fail anything to earn all my credits before graduation in two years (this did not prove to be any problem at all). She enrolled me in all the classes that I had been taking at my prior high school, then informed me that I was required to take junior-year Health class (it was “required” at my old high school too, but a lot of students tested out of it, which was I planned on doing). That left me one elective; I chose Journalism, aka the school newspaper.
So I was enrolled. At a new school. Wow. The councilor told me when classes started in the morning, and was preparing to send me on my merry way to come back fresh in the morning. “Actually,” I cut her off at some point, “I’d really like to just jump in and get started right now, if that’s all right.” Well, she made a phone call and got a student who was part of whatever the new-student-orientation group was down to her office. The councilor gave me my locker number and combination, and instructed the girl to show me my locker, the cafeteria, then to my classroom. When we got to my physics class (my first class there!), she opened the door and poked her nose in. The teacher was mid-lecture, and looked a bit perturbed to be interrupted. “Excuse me, Mr. Ingram, but I have your new student here for you,” she said timidly and politely. “New student?! I don’t have a new student…!” I popped my head into the room at this point. “Uh, hi,” I started, “I just enrolled this morning; your print roster hasn’t had the time to be updated yet. I’m just starting classes here, uh, now.” After a moment’s stare with a blank pause, he replied, “Alright, come in! Take a seat!” with wildly animated gestures. He went on with his lecture where he’d left off.
Wednesday September 19, 2001 –
I arrived at my first class of the morning, junior Health, before the instructor did. Apparently, word had gotten around, because there were several variations of, “Oh, hey! You must be the new kid!” It was a very welcoming environment, until class started. They were working on the digestive system; I remember this because the teacher was pointing to a poster diagramming the human digestive track and asking what is this? The first couple were easy give-aways (mouth and stomach I think), then he pointed to the pancreas and my hand shot up. His eyebrows drew up and I looked around the room and saw that no one else had their hands up; no one else knew what/where the pancreas was. My “city” education had taught me that back in seventh grade life science, but apparently out in the ‘burbs they hadn’t got quite that far that early on. This was the first of many culture shocks to come. The next class was Japanese, which I was pathetically behind in, due to my prior “sensei” treating us like we had the learning capabilities of grade schoolers. I had to work hard over the next two years to even sort of catch up, but my new sensei was very sympathetic, and did not blame me for my prior teacher’s lack of actual teaching.
Aftermath –
Over the next few weeks there were several hostage-situation-like phone calls between my dad and my mom, or my mom and me, negotiating how I would get my things; first was some of my clothes and my alarm clock, picked up by my dad without me present (if I’m remembering rightly – this was ten years ago, after all; I might be mixing up some of these details). Next was me picking up the rest of my clothes, and some of my entertainment stuff like my boom-box and some CDs and books, with the stipulation that I hand over my house key; this was intended as a direct statement of “You are not welcome here without prior invitation,” and it came through loud and clear. Eventually things like my bed (the queen one from my mom’s was a lot more comfortable than the twin at my dad’s) and posters moved over as well. My mom and I hardly spoke for months, and when we did it always ended in tears (mine for sure, and probably sometimes for her as well). But over the next year things started to come around. My grades still weren’t very good, but my attendance was MUCH better. I continued seeing a therapist, and eventually we had some family sessions where things got hashed out. When my mom and step-dad moved my senior year, I was allowed to decorate “my room,” even though I very rarely stayed there. (I lived in it a couple of years later, though, when I got kicked out of UO, but that’s a whole other story…). Right when I moved in, my dad set a strict curfew of 5pm, and openly admitted that he needed to get used to this “being a full-time dad” thing, but he promised to lighten it up as he got more comfortable; it wasn’t really much of an issue at first anyway, as I didn’t really have any friends in the area, so mostly just spent my afternoons at the library. By the time I had made new friends, it was getting pushed out to a more teenage-appropriate time, anyway.
The events of September 11th changed my life, but not in the way that they affected most people. For me, they sparked the final argument that broke the camel’s back between my mother and I. For all the years after, I did nothing to recognize Patriot Day until now; but two days later I always have my own private memorial of the day on which my life changed irrevocably – September 13th.
