Long Live Long Last Names
This is an achronological storytelling series and a way for me to begin recording some of the memories in my family.
Your father was the new kid in our class that year. He started the year with us before they moved into their new house in October. Your grandmother drove him to school from their old house for those first two months, making an extra long commute in the mornings.
I rode the bus. I sometimes tried to sleep, but the gravel roads were bumpy. If it was cold, I sat in the seat with the heater, third from the back on the left.
I was the new kid once, too, back in fourth grade so I knew what it was like to be new, but not like your father. He had been the new kid five times. Part of his identity formed around this way of life and he was always good at starting over. He would carry that mindset at least another decade, and it truly served us well.
When we started eighth grade, my family had a new puppy on the way. I had picked out a feisty jack russell-rat terrier with chocolate markings from a litter in August, naming him “Leo” for his zodiac sign. We took pictures of him that year with pumpkins and me in my 8th-grade varsity volleyball uniform. Leo passed away the year our first child was born.
On the second Tuesday of September that year, I rode the bus to school and your grandmother drove your father in from their old house. Everyone else in the country commuted to work and school just like any other day.
Except this particular Tuesday was September 11, 2001.
What’s the World Trade Center?”
Someone had an answer that I couldn’t really take in. I had visited New York City when I was 10 years old and there were lots of big buildings with offices…so which ones were they? I didn’t know what it all meant at first.
But when we heard a third plane had hit the Pentagon, it really sank in. I knew that was an attack on the government, the military. I recognized the significance immediately, and by then, the attacks were clearly a concerted effort.
I didn’t get to see the news coverage till I got home because by lunch time, the school administration had decided to stop showing us what was going on after calls from panicked parents. Volleyball practice was cancelled and we had to write a reaction paper due the next day in language arts.
Your father and I had the last period of the day together — 8th grade science. I don’t remember anything about our class together that day. In every class, the attacks were all anyone talked about. I remember our choir teacher was waiting to hear from a family member in New York. The look in her face that day is what I remember most.
Because your father could have moved somewhere else. He could have been pulling into the car line at some other junior high school, and I would have never met him. But he was there, at my school sitting in my science class — the new kid — on 9/11. The timeline of our story had begun.
I don’t really remember him in my science class. We would’ve made more of an impression on each other had I passed 7th-grad pre-algebra and he had kept up with band. The kids ahead in math were a small group (that I had failed to progress with), which your father joined that 8th grade year… and if he had stuck with the clarinet in band (which is what I played), there would’ve absolutely been an entry in my journal about the new boy in the woodwind section (probably complete with an illustration).
By the end of eighth grade, I still didn’t know much about the new kid in my science class. But I did know one thing:
We both had long last names, tricky to pronounce and spell.
So, when we traded yearbooks during 7th-period science on the last day of 8th grade, he wrote something like the classic HAGS (Have a Great Summer), and I wrote what may have been the most premonitory statement of both our lives:
Long live long last names!”
Little did I know I would actually be the reason his long last name would live on, for your father was, in fact, the last of his name…until we had you two. Who knew the blank pages of a junior high yearbook and (what I assume was) a neon gel pen could produce such magic?
That’s the origin story of us, before we even became us, when we were just in the backgrounds of each other’s lives with history happening in the foreground. For me, and I think many in my generation, whatever was left of my childhood mindset was gone forever after that day. We knew nothing would ever be the same for our country after that.
It’s been 18 years, and we’ll never forget the year we met because of 9/11. Someday, a grandchild will ask me (if they’re curious enough), “When did you two first meet?” and I’ll always say, “It was the year of 9/11,” and if they ask me to tell them about 9/11, I’ll always have to begin with, “It was the year I met your grandfather.”
Sometimes we may feel that our lives are not making history, but our lives are histories in and of themselves.
