September 11th

Considering I’m a pretty funny guy (at least in my own head) and usually try to deal with tragedy or sadness with humor this is one of those days that’s difficult for me to deal with. BC when it comes down to it there is no humor to be found on this day.

As a first grade teacher from 2002 on to my present years as an assistant principal I always struggled with the appropriate way to handle today in the classroom. By now none of the kids in my school were even close to being born in 2001, so the events of that day are not really a tragedy but more an event from history.

But to me and the rest of the people who lived through that day. Sept 11 has become our generations Pearl Harbor and now we’re faced with the task of deciding how to remember another, as Roosevelt put it, “day that will live in infamy.”

So the question is how exactly do you talk to your child about this. I mean not at four months or even four years, but down the road. Because just saying the date out loud… September 11, conjures up the images of walking through the empty and silent CCSU campus wondering what in the hell was going on.

Then spending the rest of the day sitting in my dorm room watching the events unfold with the guys in silence for hours. So it’s more than history, it’s real life. It happened. We watched it happen. Steph and I were at Ground Zero less than a month later.

I guess just like everything else in life we have to take it day by day. When the time comes though I’m not sure I’ll know what to say to him… But no matter what history has already dictated a portrait of Sept 11th… That being one of heroes, selflessness, sacrifice and patriotism. Maybe that’s how we all need to look at this day whether you’re four months, four years or forty