I had French class after lunch. The history teacher next door had borrowed a TV from the library and was showing the local news to his class. Our teacher opened the door between the rooms and we all crowded in to watch the same clip of the planes hitting the towers again and again. I thought it was computer generated. I didn't believe it was real. The entire school was dismissed early. We were rushed through the halls and told not to stop at our lockers.
Outside it was beautiful, uncommonly warm for mid-September in New England. I always stopped at the Dunkin Donuts beside the high school and ordered a medium iced coffee with skim milk and two sugars to drink on my walk home. As I approached the store that day I noticed the blinds were drawn. When I tried the door it was locked. The twenty-four hour Dunkin Donuts that was open on every major holiday had closed.
When less than a month later I watched the green, grainy footage of the US bombing Afghanistan nothing made sense to me. We didn't learn anything in school about the Middle East beyond Mesopotamia. I remember walking by the war memorial park that I would get married in six years later and seeing yellow ribbons tied around the trees. Somehow I knew this war would drag on for years. I started taking photographs with intentions of creating an album so that I'd someday recall what it was like in the beginning. I had no idea then how the war would impact me personally in the future.
Although we didn't learn about modern history or the Middle East in school, we spent months on both world wars. I wondered if the so called War on Terror would ever be so widespread. I wondered if we would fall into another Great Depression or if we'd have to ration food and goods. To prepare, I started stockpiling coffee.
In the summer time my mother would always make herself glasses of instant iced coffee. She'd scoop the brown Folgers crystals into her glass with a teaspoon, add sugar, and swirl them together as she held the glass under the kitchen sink. She'd add in milk, take a single sip, sigh audibly, then leave the glass on the yellow counter-top to go outside and smoke a cigarette. The bubbles that had formed from the stirring at the sink always looked delicious and I would sip them secretly before my mother returned to the kitchen. So began my addiction to coffee.
By my junior year in high school I would start each day with four shots of espresso, black with sugar. I had my second coffee on my way home from school, and sometimes drank a third at night after dinner. Looking back now, it's no wonder I could never sleep at night.
Back when newspapers only cost a quarter or two a day, my father used to buy The Boston Globe. On Sundays it came filled with advertisements for local stores. The Folgers ad was in one of the coupon books. The top had a round scratch and sniff circle that smelled like coffee. I kept it in my Calculus book senior year and would take it out to inhale the scent mid-morning every day.
Even though the war in Afghanistan is still going on twelve years later, we haven't had to deal with rationing and for most Americans the war may as well be over. Newspaper articles slowly made their way from the front page further into the paper until they became almost non-existent. My high school students who were just infants on September 11, 2001 don't even know we are at war. In college, when my coffee addiction reached an all time high, I drank the pounds of coffee that I'd been storing in my bedroom. The Folgers coffee ad resurfaced weeks ago when I was going through bins that I'd been storing at my parents' house. I no longer need the scent of coffee to get me through the day and no longer need pointless pieces of paper to remind me of the past.
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