Open Arms

"I can't believe it," I said to Tim, my mother's boyfriend. "I know," he responded. He was a man of few words. We stood there on the cliff of the old rock quarry in Cedar Grove, NJ, which over looked Montclair and everything westward to the City. The smoke billowed from what was the foundation of the Twin Towers. Two black and brown pillars of smoke coalesced and rose into the air like a mirror image of the rubble below. The wind blew the ash away into the emptiness of the sky as the scene was burned into our brains. More and more people flocked to the spot we were standing. It had a beautiful view of the New York City skyline. On any other day it would have been a picture perfect setting.

The suburban sprawl that is North Jersey rolled away from the foot of the cliff and it seemed like the opening scene from The Lion King, when Mufasa looks out and sees the plains of Africa rolling from his throne like a running river. The Hudson River glistened in the hot sun and were it not the Hudson River it would have looked very inviting.

To the left, The Empire State Building and The Chrysler Building stood tall and strong, while the sun reflected off of the windows and made each building look as if it was forming tear drops for their fallen brethren.
The smoke continued to billow. I went over the day in my head. It had started out as a normal day, which should have tipped me off because that is the most clich thing about tragedy.

One of the Math teachers had run into my Chemistry class and told the teacher that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. Thinking it was a small private plane my first instinct was pilot error or plane malfunction. I was dead wrong. My teacher, several years older and wiser than I knew what it was. "Terrorism" he boldly and immediately declared.

I didn't believe it, but I kept my mouth shut. He always had a TV in his room, as a thirty-year veteran, he was entitled to some perks. The TV was on instantly, just in time to see the second plane hit at 9:03. There was a collective gulp in the classroom as if 25 Tupper-ware containers had just been shut at the same time.
I remember walking to an assembly that our principle was holding because of everything that was going on. There was a TV on in one of the rooms and through the shoulders that I stood behind I could just barely make out the collapse of the first tower. "That was the most incredible thing I have ever seen," my history teacher said to me flatly,

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