Images of the Heart Are the Best Memorial

The first few days after it happened, the image that haunted me most wasn't the sight of the Twin Towers tumbling down one by one, horrific as that was as viewed from my Brooklyn apartment window. It wasn't the memory of that muffled boom I had heard before that as I sat on my sofa last Sept. 11, drinking my morning cup of coffee. "What the heck was that?" I asked a friend sitting next to me, not yet knowing a second plane had just hit the World Trade Center. Had I looked over my left shoulder, I would have seen both Twin Towers sheared open and belching smoke.

Johnette Howard

September 11, 2002