I say it every year.  I remember.  I was not even five years old yet-- a child, confused-- but I remember so clearly the panic shooting through the air, how I just stood in front of the TV in our little yellow family room.  The screen flashed footage of these buildings burning, falling apart, and the people whose faces were filled with sheer terror.  It didn't make sense to me.  Even if I can't remember how my mom pulled to the side of the road when driving to comfort or seek comfort from friends because the tears were blurring her vision, or how scarred she and her friends were that Daddy and the other men worked for big companies in Boston at the time would be victims of this cruelty, the memory in my family room remains as frozen in my brain as I was in front of the TV.  I knew something was wrong, and it bothered me.
  A few months after 9/11, my parents took us to New York.  Although I have no other recollections of that entire vacation, I remember driving past the site, still in ruins, and the solemn tone of my parents as they told us what this desolate place was.
  It wasn't till years later that I really understood what happened.  The story clicked with the frightening memory and sent chills through me.  Yet as each year went by, people spoke and less of the attack, the event to "Never Forget."
  But my Spanish teacher today was different.  She was the only teacher to talk about it.  Her voice was grim, her face hard, as she spent almost the entire class period discussing that day-- for she had been a teacher in New York at the time and experienced the horrors firsthand as her hometown was attacked and many of the people she was close to lost family members or barely escaped death themselves.  Her stories left my head aching, my eyes stinging as I forced myself not to let the tears escape.  She also brought up the Boston Marathon bombing, which definitely renewed that feeling of gut-sickness for me.  Although this much-more-recent act of violence did not take a fraction of the amount of lives as 9/11, the pain of fellow Americans dying at the hand of the hateful was still the same.  I used to live in Boston.  I knew people who were at the Marathon and it terrified me.
  It never ceased to amaze me, though, how many miracles can happen in tragedies like this.  She told us with a surety that she believed an unseen hand was working to help some people.  As she said that, two kids raised their hands to relate stories of how their parents were supposed to be working on one of the top floors that day, but had this strange desire to get some food and be a little late, or got sick.  There are several-- I mean SEVERAL-- true stories I have heard like that.  "It's kinda freaky," my teacher admitted, and I don't think she or many others including myself would believe that it's mere "coincidence."  In Boston, some very close family friends would have attended the marathon like always if not for a school trip happening to planned at the same time.  My kindergarten teacher was actually at the marathon with her kids, but luckily waited at the halfway point.   I hear people with especially-close calls say that they do everything now to make sure their lives are fulfilled because they know it was God who preserved them.
  I don't understand why people are hateful, violent.  Nor do I understand on the complete opposite side the miracles that happen.  But I want to say that I am proud to be an American.  And I am thankful for a God who cares.  And I will Never Forget.