Mr. Costa

In the fall of 2001, I had just begun my sophomore year as a music major at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, I was transitioning in between my vocal techniques and music theory courses when murmurs began amongst students that a plane had struck a building in one of our major cities. I heard myriad different interpretations from my friends, ranging from attacks on the Sears Tower in Chicago to the Empire State Building in New York to the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. Because this was in the days before widespread cellphone use and social networking, the details remained unclear for a period of time.

The music building where all of our classes took place was largely closed off from the rest of the university, so the only access we had to breaking news was through the few computer stations that existed in the music library. By the time I was able to reach a computer myself, the CNN homepage was displaying images of the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan, with plumes of smoke billowing upward from both buildings and enshrouding part of the city's skyline. More rapidly now, the morning's events unraveled before us in horrific detail. As shocking as the news out of New York was, it was the terrorist attack on the US Pentagon only two hours away from us that stirred up the greatest emotion. Many of my classmates grew up in the Washington area, and several of them - including my best friend - had parents who worked for the Department of Defense.

Since it was only 11:00am at this point, the university had not yet made any announcement about calling off classes. We all trudged to our music theory class feeling a mixture of anger, sadness, and disbelief. Once there, our professor gave us the option to either hold class as usual or cancel for the day. We elected to hold class, if for no other reason than to temporarily take our minds off of all the atrocities occurring at that moment. By 12:30, the university president notified the student body that even though classes would continue as scheduled for the day, teachers had the authority to suspend their individual classes if they felt it appropriate. I had four other courses that afternoon; we spent all of them together, discussing and reflecting on what had happened that morning. At dusk that evening, a mass of students convened on the university quad for a touching candlelight vigil. Few people spoke, but the intensity of the moment spoke volumes that still register with me.

Two months later, I had the privilege of traveling to New York to march in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with JMU's marching band. After the parade, a group of us traveled to the site of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Seeing the wreckage first hand was a singular experience. Though no one close to me was directly impacted by the 9/11 attacks, there were still stories to tell, and there always will be. Just like some of our country's other defining tragedies (Pearl Harbor, JFK's assassination), September 11th is not only a valuable history lesson, but also an event that demonstrates the awesome power of humans to recover, persevere, and thrive in the face of unimaginable destruction.