Mrs. Creed was the worst teacher I ever had.
It wasn't that I didn't learn anything in her third grade classroom. In fact, she encouraged me to read ahead, and even gave me books she thought I would enjoy reading. She spent time explaining multiplication and long division so everyone understood, and she emphasized the importance of impeccable penmanship.
Mrs. Creed was a bad teacher because she forced us to remember Sept. 11, 2001.
She was hysterical when she came back in our room after being called outside by the assistant principal. She turned out the lights and closed the blinds and made us sit on the floor between bookshelves, in fear "they" would see us. To pass time on the hard floor, Mrs. Creed wheeled out a television, and turned it on to a woman reporting the news in a pantsuit standing knee-deep in dusty, gray matter.
Mrs. Creed did everything possible to make us remember that day, not giving us or our parents the option to let us truly understand the matter. Let me be clear: remembering 9/11 is important for the nation, but not healthy for a naive, innocent 8-year-old. She pointed out different countries that could have possibly done this to us on a map. She made us write the day's events in essay form while she cried at her desk. She told us of bomb drills she had as a little girl. She told us about war. Instead of distracting us, or teaching us that day's lessons, she came up with activities on the fly with the intent for us to remember that day years to come.
And do I remember.
In my memory, I see the images of the plane crashing into the second building, and then the first tower crumbling out of the sky. I can't recall if I saw those clips on Mrs. Creed's television, or my own because Mrs. Creed told us our only homework for the night was to watch the news. My mother argued with me, and said that I couldn't watch it, but she gave up when my aunt Joanna arrived to babysit me so my mom could go to night school. For whatever reason, I wanted to follow Mrs. Creed's homework rules before listening to my own mother.
I remember 9/11 so vividly because my teacher didn't give my mother the chance to explain the day's events. Mrs. Creed had already shocked me before I got on the bus that afternoon. In that way, the terrorists won that day. They scared her, and she in turn, scared us.
I couldn't forget 9/11, but I can't remember the day Joanna died in a house fire a few months later. Whether what I saw was so traumatic that my mind blacked it out, or whether my eyes were shielded by a family friend while my mother ran to the firefighters, I have no memory of seeing that fire.
How can a distant tragedy be so vivid, but a personal trauma draw blanks?
A few years later, when I had grown from a curious child to an angsty preteen, Katrina made landfall a few hours south from my home in East Baton Rouge Parish.
After collecting the usual supplies from the store, I remember watching a male reporter in Jackson Square on my family's generator-powered television saying, "New Orleans is saved! The people are throwing hurricane parties in the street. Katrina has overlooked us." My family went back to playing Monopoly, happy that our state suffered no serious damage. A few hours later when my father turned the TV back on to get updates, we saw the water rising. I didn't understand the extent of it until school was canceled for a week, not because our schools were without power (Zachary was out of power for less than 48 hours), but because people needed our buses to get out of New Orleans. I didn't understand the extent of it until my classmates and I squeezed into our rooms once school did start back up; more than 100 new students flooded my middle school. Some left in a few days, some in a few months, and some walked across the graduation stage with me six years later.
Still, despite the proximity, to me Katrina was only a week off of school and a downed tree in my yard. I saw the rooftop rescues on television, but it felt distant, and I felt indifferent.
It wasn't until I went to college that I personally empathized with Katrina's victims. I became friends with classmates who on every anniversary of landfall would grieve their city. They would share Facebook statuses and Instagram pictures of their homes, schools and friends that they never saw again. During the tenth anniversary this year, national media outlets praised New Orleans' rebirth as the comeback kid, but my friends still bemoaned the New Orleans it once was, and the New Orleans it will never be again.
I believe the difference between two events in my mind was my exposure to media. At 8-years-old, I watched thousands of people die on television over and over again, and remember that day clearly. At the same age, I witnessed my aunt's house burn to the ground, but I have no recollection of the night. Had I been forced to watch my family's worst day over and over again on television, I might remember the horror. Thankfully, I don't have to remember. When Katrina made landfall, I never saw any graphic images, and the images I did see were few because my family was saving generator juice for the fridge and box fans. I vaguely remember the weeks following Katrina, but I never truly empathized until I became friends with victims as an adult; I read their memories online every year on Katrina's anniversary.
Sometimes the things we want to forget never leave us, sometimes our minds bless us with blackouts instead of real memories, and sometimes we simply remember the general event instead of the specific moments. The mind is a mystery.
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