OPINION: Memories of 9/11 will never fade. But they will always inspire, too

David McGrath
David McGrath

On Nov. 22, 1963, I was doing a crossword puzzle in my high school study hall when the announcement came over the public address system that President John F. Kennedy had been shot.

On April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, I was working at a Jewel Foods pickup station in the Evergreen Plaza parking lot, loading groceries into people’s cars.

But on Sept. 11, 2001, I was all alone, which you do not want to be when the world is being ripped apart.

My three children had gone back to school. My wife, Marianne, was teaching her fourth-grade class on Chicago’s South Side. But I wouldn’t go back to my college English classes for another two weeks, so I had driven to northwest Wisconsin to winterize our fishing cabin and catch some walleye before the cold set in.

The cabin TV had no signal, as was often the case in the woods, but a news bulletin came over the radio: heavy smoke was pouring from one of the Twin Towers in New York City. Minutes later, the North Tower collapsed, and I was filled with panic and fear.

Though our cabin had a landline, only my wife had a cellphone back then, and I could not reach her during the school day. I dialed my brother, but there was no answer. I rushed outside. It was cold and still that morning. A chickadee in one of the surrounding pine trees made the only sound, a plaintive whistle.

I looked up into the empty sky and went back in.

Improbable visuals were being described over the radio: People leaping to their deaths from the upper floors; survivors running through the streets, bloody and disoriented; a hijacked jet crashing into the Pentagon; fire trucks blaring down 7th Avenue; the second tower crumbling to earth. I sat in the chair facing the window that looked out onto the lake.

Our country was under attack. My family was scattered. There was no one with whom to grieve.

Suddenly I heard a burst from a car horn. A van with “Northern Electric Co-op” on its side had pulled in behind the house. The cabin furnace had refused to turn on the day before, and the dispatcher had promised to send someone when he could.

Scott wore blue coveralls and was over 6 feet, with a mop of shaggy brown hair. Not quite 30 years old, he had an easy smile and called me “sir.“ 

I led him to the utility room where he set his heavy tool belt on the floor. I described the symptoms of the temperamental furnace. “Probably the igniter, sir,” he said. He knelt, removed the front panel and was peering inside with a pen light.

“Did you know . . .  hear anything about New York?” I asked. Scott turned and looked up into my eyes. “Oh, yes," he said. "Surreal. We were all watching it at the shop.”

I visualized Scott and several other men I’d never met, all in blue coveralls, staring up at the TV on an upper corner shelf. And I felt less alone.

“My foreman says the FBI probably already knows who did it,” Scott said. “What with cameras all over the airport. Passenger manifests.” Scott did not doubt his foreman. He said he just wondered why suicide attacks kept happening. 

I wanted to ask if he were married. What his hopes were for himself and his children, and for the world in the four or five decades of life ahead of him. He went outside and retrieved a new igniter from the van and replaced the old one. He asked me to turn up the thermostat. Everything worked fine, and I signed his clipboard.

Scott paused at the door as he folded and coiled his tool belt. President George W. Bush’s voice was audible from the radio in the kitchen. “We need to figure something out,” he said. “Gotta do something.” 

A parting smile, and then he left.

The country did do something. In the first three weeks after 9/11, Americans donated $657 million for families of the 2,957 people killed – and $2 billion by the end of the year, according to a University of Indiana survey in June 2002.

Meanwhile, nearly 1.6 million people gave blood for those who were injured. In all 60% of the nation’s population either wrote checks, donated blood or volunteered various services in the aftermath of 9/11.

Scott’s foreman was not wrong about the perpetrators being caught and punished, though it was infinitely more costly and time consuming than he ever could have imagined. And Scott’s acknowledgment that terrorism keeps happening is just as true today.

But there is something inside us that wants to seek out others after a catastrophe: a hunger for human contact – an inclination toward empathy – that inspires us to “figure something out.”

However long it may take.

David McGrath is an English instructor at Florida SouthWestern State College in Punta Gorda. He is the author of the book "South Siders." Email: