The air buzzed at today’s farmers’ market at Spence Farm with the usual sounds: conversations, sales, music, this week by the Elderly Brothers Duo.
Until 1 o’clock.
That’s when bells rang for one minute to mark the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001.
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The crowd, vendors and band fell silent. After the bells rang, Sara Tancredi, a seventh grader at read a few words thanking people for their examples of courage and sacrifice a decade ago and asking for consolation for families and friends affected by that tragedy. Then the band keyboard player, who produced the synthesized bell sounds, and the rest of the band launched into Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.”
“It seems like yesterday,” commented farmers’ market visitor Harry Austin of Woburn, that terrorists aimed planes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and passengers diverted a third plane into a field in Pennsylvania. With all the media coverage and replays of the event in the past week, “It feels like it just happened,” Austin said. “Thankfully,” he added, Osama bin Ladin, the terror ringleader, “is dead.”
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Commemoration activities “caused Americans – us – to reflect” on what happened and what it means, said Fel Medeiros, who came to the states from Portugal in 1968 and to Woburn in 1999. We are a community of many different people, said Medeiros, who is active in WREN, the Woburn Residents’ Environmental Network.
"We need to learn how to live together,” he said, “acknowledge our difference and try to shape a better future.”
Tragedies and deaths occur in other countries on a daily basis, Medeiros said, and even “We have 9-11s every day on a smaller scale,” such as a police officer shot protecting the community.
People remember exactly where they were the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Ann Galvin was on her way to a 9 a.m. exercise class. When she heard about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center tower, the mother of Mayor Scott Galvin thought at first, she said, that it was an accident. Then, she said, she heard about the second plane.
The attacks were “surreal,” she said. She wasn’t thinking about them today. She’s been listening, she said, to the news and commemorative programs all week. She put reports of a terror threat today in New York and Washington, DC, “in the back of my mind, too.” Today, she said, is the birthday of a dear friend, who is 92.
Chris Stevens was in his office in Unicorn Park, online, he said, when the first plane hit. He made two calls, he said: one to his wife and one to a friend who was a flight attendant for American Airlines. She was safe.
Sept. 11, 2001 “brought the country together,” Stevens said, “but we’re still at war as a result of that attack.”
Charlie Young of Billerica worked at a computer network company, the Billerica resident said, with lots of TVs, all showing the destruction. Laurie Young was also watching TV, she said, while she cleaned the house. Ironically, Charlie Young said, he looked at his clock this morning, 9/11, at exactly 9:11 a.m.
