On September 11, 2001, I was a newly minted librarian in my first librarian position adjusting to living back in the Mainland U.S. after a decade in Hawaii. At our branch of the Sacramento Public Library, each day a different staff member came in before everyone else, and my day was Tuesday. On my way to work on September 11th, I heard the somber newscasters reporting the morning’s horrific trauma. I had to hear the recap over and over again before I could comprehend that this was truly deliberate. It would be hours before I could wrap my brain around the magnitude of the attack. My vision felt like it was tunneling as I drove. I remember shaking as I unlocked the door and turned on the lights in the library. I don’t remember what I did next, alone there for that first hour. Did I just have the internet or was there was a radio? I do remember doing my tasks, although I was surely on a shocked sort of autopilot. I knew those towers. More than once during my internship for the New York Public Library, I stood in line at the TKTS booth at the World Trade Center to snag bargains on Broadway shows. That was in the summer of 2000, just about a year prior. The TKTS booth was in the area beneath the towers. I remember high ceilings, a lot of glass, painted steel, and a feeling of vastness. As lines go, it was not a horrible place to wait because of all the windows and sunlight. From my housing situation in Manhattan, I got to the World Trade Center via the convenient subway station under the buildings. The subway let out into a mall-like area. I remember a Gap store. These memories bounced around my head that morning at the library. “I was there,” I kept thinking to myself. Once my co-workers started to arrive, someone got a television hooked up at the circulation desk. The footage replayed over and over again all day. It was like lashes on a raw wound. I remember people saying not to let young children watch because they would think the attacks were happening over and over again. As an adult, I watched to try and understand. I couldn’t. Over the course of the day something emerged from my brokenness, like a web, that connected with others to expand and stretch around the victims, fighters, families, city, and country. It felt tangible like I should be able to see whatever this was I was a part of, this sorrowful gentle cradling of humanity.
~Librarian Robin
Reading Goggles 