Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This: My Personal September 11

For more than twenty years, every time September 11 rolled around, my mother reminded me to be careful. Not that she was being morbid; I appreciated the fact that she remembered—and helped me remember—what happened on that day in 1974.

My parents gave me a bicycle on my seventh birthday, an occasion marred only slightly by a sign of the times. Earlier that day, when a neighbor looked out her back window and saw two hippies—my brothers Tom and Jon—carrying a kid’s bike across an open field, she assumed they’d stolen it to buy drugs, and called the police. (She wasn’t wrong about their behavior in general, but certainly wrong in that instance—not to mention the matter of being a busybody.)

But I got my bike anyway, and learned to ride on a hill with a lot of trial and error and skinned-up knees. Training wheels, in my mind, were for girls, and I prided myself on never crying at physical pain, no matter how severe.

Despite, or rather because of, a fairly strict home life, I ran wild whenever I got the chance, and that little yellow bike was my vehicle of escape. I couldn’t wait for them to unpack it from the shipping crate in Manila.

This was a different time, a different world, when parents didn’t worry as much about their children—partly because they didn’t have to, and partly because most weren’t as involved in their kids’ lives as parents are today. So I roamed more or less free.

Some other American kids and I formed a gang and rode around “spying” on people, throwing eggs, and generally causing mayhem. We got really out of hand when showing off in front of older kids. One time a couple of high schoolers dared us to climb up on a roof and toss a big porcelain toilet-bowl cover onto the tile beside some hapless guy’s swimming pool. Guess who took the dare? Hearing it shatter scared us all—even the big kids—and we fled like chickens. (Yes, it’s regrettable that we represented our country so poorly. But we were just kids.)

That’s how I spent my time outside of school, when I wasn’t busy being a Cub Scout and publicly upholding virtues belied by my extracurricular activities. But my days as a hellion on a bike came to an end on September 11, just a few weeks before my tenth birthday.

As I prepared to cross the busy street that afternoon, I looked to the left and saw the cement truck speeding toward me, which is a good thing, because otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this. Then again, if I hadn’t been hurrying to avoid it, I might have noticed the Jeep coming from the right.

Next thing I knew, I was crawling out from under the hood with my head bleeding. I kept calm as the couple who had hit me scooped me up, along with the crumpled bike, and put us in the back seat. I told them our phone number (999-142—I still remember that, and yes, it was only six digits), so they could call my parents from the hospital. I looked down at my white shirt and saw drops of blood, felt the pain starting to emerge from under the shock, and still my lip didn’t tremble.
But then they started talking.

They belonged to Iglesia ne Cristo, a semi-cultish group known for their elaborate church buildings. The man told me I was lucky it wasn’t a member of a rival sect who had hit me, because they would have just driven on and left me to bleed on the pavement. The woman chimed in: members of that other church were scum.

That’s when I burst into tears. I didn’t care about theological grudge matches; I just wanted my mommy.

The doctor put a couple stitches in my head, and that was that. The entire bill was 40 pesos, about five dollars at the time: this was, after all, the third world. And, being the third world, nobody thought about taking X-rays, thus leaving me with permanent back problems.

That physical pain has always been there to remind me of September 11, 1974, and for a long time, my mother remembered. She had an excellent memory, but by the time 9/11 became a bad day on an infinitely greater scale, Alzheimer’s had robbed her of it. She probably never even knew what happened on that day in 2001, nor did she remember what had happened in Manila long before. She didn’t remember me at all, and though she went on living for fifteen months, she had died in my mind much earlier. But her love remained alive in me, along with her warning to be just a little extra-careful on September 11.