Echo Taps

The evening of September 11 I attended “Echo Taps” on the Norwich campus. All the cadets turn out at 9:45 pm in their dress uniforms, everyone gathers on the big green space called the Upper Parade Ground, and at 10pm a student piper plays Amazing Grace, and then two student buglers at each end of the Parade Ground play taps, one echoing the other. No one makes a sound, except the musicians. It was very solemn, very appropriate, and comforting.

Vermonters agree, of course, that the terrorist attacks were a horrible event and a horrible tragedy, but none of the Vermonters I know were there, or close to there, as so many New Yorkers and New Jerseyans were. For us, our feelings are a little different, and deeper, and as we remember the reality of that day and the ones that followed, we’re perhaps a little more reflective. This year I have two faculty members who were living in New York on that day. Both lost friends, and one is always distressed at not being in NYC when September 11 comes along. I told him I would go to Echo Taps on his behalf, and he said that would make him feel better.

I will always remember the way people left shopping carts in the aisles and raced out of the Shop-Rite when the manager announced that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

I will always remember WFUV playing any song a listener requested, all day until well after midnight, as long as the song had some relevance for peace.

I will always remember my super’s wife sitting in my apartment because a woman who lived downstairs from me had not come home – she did, well after suppertime.

I will always be grateful that my former husband, the father of my beloved sons, survived, having had to run for his life as the second tower fell. I will always be grateful that good friends who worked near the towers were not hurt, although it took days to hear from them. I will always be grateful that a church friend, and the mother of a dear Norwich friend, both managed to get out of the towers in time.
 
I will always remember being confused, maybe even disoriented, because the weather was bright and sunny and sparkling. It had started out to be a “perfect day”. By 9am that sunshine seemed out of place, and completely wrong.

This is not my photo.  Someone sent it to me, from a website or a photo collection, sometime over the many nights that those lights reached upward.  If someone emails me the source, I will gladly credit it.