One Good Memory

On September 11,2001,it was a sunny,cloudless morning in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan and Callie,who had just started 9th grade,arrived at the East Side Community School. She went up the stairs and met her friend Katie and continued on to their English class together. As she went down the crowded hall, her anticipation grew with every step she took toward room 209 at the end of the hall. She always enjoyed school,never wanting to miss a day,always asking questions about the world around her and was very smart for her age of 14. 

    Then the final bell went off down the hallways,loud and strong. Then the teacher named Mrs.Williams stood up to address the class.

“Good morning everyone,let us get out your workbooks and turn to Lesson 2- Clauses and Sentences.”and quietly sat back down in her chair behind her desk,then asking a boy at back of the room,named Daniel to come to the whiteboard and write a “complete sentence” from his workbook,underlining the two main parts of the sentence. He frowned at the teacher,while walking up to the board,having a look of unwillingness and anger that everyone in the classroom could see.

He grabbed a marker from the tray and wrote “I played my Playstation on Monday.”and was wondering why she had to pick him at all,as he sat back down.  

Mrs.Williams said “Thank you Daniel. Now who can tell me what every complete sentence needs?”

A few hands raised,then she looked at Callie and chose her to answer the question. 

“The two main parts of a complete sentence are the subject and the verb.” replied Callie, feeling a sense of gratification for her response,as the teacher gave her a thumbs up. 

Mrs.Williams continued on with the lesson,making sure all the students were focused and ready to listen,before she went on with the spoken part of the lesson. She defined the word “clauses”as an “expression including a subject and a predicate,but is not always a complete sentence. Then asked the class what are the types of clauses?”

Katie and Callie were the only ones of the class that knew what the answer to the question was. Their hands raised together and Mrs.Williams chose Katie to come up and write the names of the parts on the board. Then she popped up from her seat with a feeling of joy to do the work and put her answer of “Independant and Dependant”on the board,then Mrs.Williams asked if she could define them for her,but she shrugged and said “Sorry Mrs.Williams,I’m sure about that,but my answer of the types is right.” Mrs.Williams nodded her head and told Katie that she could sit back down. As she returned to her desk,Daniel called her a “show-off”and scowled at her as some of the other kids laughed. Daniel’s rude comment didn’t seem to phase her like he wanted it to because Katie was a very competitive child since she is on the school’s soccer team and knew how to keep her emotions in check when it came to playing a game or school work. 

Mrs.Williams went on by defining the two types as “the part of a sentence that could stand alone as a complete sentence or the opposite:they cannot be complete a complete sentence.”

Everyone was staring at the clock.just waiting to get out with the ending of the class,when at 8:46 am all of the students and staff in the entire school heard a sound that they would remember for the rest of their lives. It sounded like a bomb had gone off to them. Then Mrs.Williams took the remote from her desk and switched the T.V. on. She went through the many channels, arriving on CNN. 

Everyone was glued to the T.V. screen as they showed the image of the Twin Towers with the North Tower smoldering,then they were reading the caption at the bottom of the screen. It was saying that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Callie screamed “Oh God! My mom works in that building!” 

All the students were shocked at the event,not knowing what to do,wondering if it was an accident or something else entirely. Callie began to cry,still trying to wrap her head around what had just happened,feeling terrified about her mom. The other students in the room came over to console her. Her friend Katie hugged her,while telling her to not worry and that her mom would be alright. The other students surrounded her,all feeling sorry for her,stood in silence,while fighting back tears of their own. It made her calm down a little,seeing how much they all cared about her, but she had mixed emotions,mainly of unrest and pain about her mother,still unsure if she was alright. 

Mrs.Williams asked Callie if she wanted to go to the restroom to clean up a bit. She walked slowly towards the restroom,hearing the sirens outside of the different emergency vehicles going by. She went in and wiped her face off,then entered a stall and started sobbing more,feeling powerless trying to contact her mom,but had no luck. Then at 9:03 am,Callie heard another noise much like the first one and thought it had happened again. She bolted back to the classroom to collect her things,while everyone else was flooding the hallways,rushing to the exits. Cars were parking around the building with upset parents waiting to pick up their children. 

Tensions were rising with every passing minute,Callie felt worse,knowing her mom didn’t have a car,just a bus pass,so she couldn’t pick her up from school. Then she met Katie outside and Katie’s mom pulled up and asked her if she needed a ride home. She said in a low,timid voice “That would be great.”then they got in the car together as Callie smiled.

A short time later,Callie arrived at her apartment building,not saying a word on the trip,then trudged up the stairs and opened the door and crashed on the couch,next to grandma, who looked after the baby in the day time when Callie’s mom worked. The baby was sleeping in grandma’s arms with the T.V. muted,but was on a channel with the news on following the recent events. 

Then at 10:00 am Callie and her grandma were horrified as had just witnessed the South Tower collapsing. Callie was thinking about all the things that were happening in a relevently short time,if she would see her mother again,what would happen if her mom were to die and what would become of her,grandma and baby brother,Nathan. All these thoughts crossed her mind,troubling her immensely.  

 Callie asked grandma “Can this day get any worse?” 

Grandma removed her bible from the stand by her side and read a verse from Matthew that gave her strength during bad times to Callie in a calm and soothing voice “To have faith as small as a mustard seed,you can move mountains and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Callie whispered to grandma “Okay,I think I can do that.”and she whispered back “I know you can,my dear.” 

Then the door opened with her mother walking through at 10:28 am,just as the North tower began to collapse,it seemed unreal to Callie at first,seeing her mom alive and she ran to the door,while her mother was embracing her,Callie told her mother that she was “my one good memory”about today.