U.S. Campus Life Boston grieves By Masako Yamada	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
テロ事件の影響 雅子さんが世界貿易センタービル攻撃を知ったのは、当日の朝、友人とコーヒーを楽しんでいるときでした。雅子さんはニューヨークにゆかりがあり、友人もたくさんいます。親しい友人たちの無事は一応確認されましたが、ニューヨークをはじめ、ボストン住民の間にも広まった不安はいまだ払しょくされていません。

At around 9 a.m. on Sept. 11, some of my labmates and I went to the Starbucks across the street for our daily coffee. It was a lovely morning and one of my friends told me he thought it would be a lucky day since he saw a gorgeous pair of twins on the subway.

CNN is broadcast all day inside this Starbucks and when we arrived, we saw another pair of twins on the TV screen: the World Trade Center (WTC) twin towers. We joked that it was a day of twins, but as we started to absorb more of the news, we realized that nothing about it was funny. Back in the lab, we turned on the radio. We kept it on all day. We heard, but couldn't quite believe, that the Pentagon had been attacked and that the twin towers had collapsed.

This wasn't just some event going on elsewhere; it wasn't just something we saw on TV or heard on the radio. Within minutes of the attacks, one of my labmates was frantically talking on the phone with her boyfriend who works on Wall Street. I started getting e-mail messages from my classmates in high school, Keio Academy of New York, confirming that the alumni who work in New York City and Washington were all safe.

My college, Wellesley College, also collected information about alumnae and posted the information on an electronic bulletin board. Alums could go to the Web site and put up short messages such as "Have you heard from XXX, Class of 1996?" and "I'm safe here in New York." It is through this bulletin board that I learned that one of my classmates had been on AA Flight 11, which had been hijacked out of Boston. I didn't know her well, but I did know her, and it shocked me.

Boston is known to be a sleepy little city that hides in the shadow of major cities like New York City, Washington, Los Angeles and Chicago. But even though Boston wasn't the direct target of these attacks, the people of this city have been utterly devastated. This is especially true since both AA Flight 11 and UA Flight 175 departed from Boston. Our local paper, the Boston Globe, has published short profiles of those on board those planes. Among those listed were many Bostonians. BU announced that 15 BU alumni were on those planes.

It's probably not an exaggeration to say that everybody in the United States has some connection to New York City, or Washington. Perhaps they know somebody who works there or perhaps they've visited on a sightseeing trip. Even if they themselves are unscathed and their friends and family are safe, many people feel intense fear and pain because they know that on another day, it could have been them. I've heard frightening "near-miss" stories from my friends: the father of one of my friends was scheduled to take AA Flight 77 on the day after the attacks; a former labmate who had recently started working on Wall Street missed his subway into the WTC because he got up late and he saw the second plane hit the WTC from his home; my brother's girlfriend was near the Pentagon and my Dad had to drive down from New Jersey to pick her up.

Even after the first frenzied days following the attack, tension is still high. Several days after the attack, I agreed to meet with a friend to practice some music. As I was walking toward the conservatory, she ran up to me from behind. She told me that she was late because she'd decided to take the bus instead of the subway. She had heard on the news that Boston had been identified as a potential terrorist target and now she refuses to take the subway. There are subway stations underneath Boston's two major skyscrapers and she is afraid of being trapped.

In addition to the fear of "what could have been," there is still the very real fear of "what could still be." I've noticed that some people around me have stopped everything and have focused on contemplating these events, while others have tried to hurry on with their "normal" lives. People are reacting in different ways, but they are undeniably reacting. I see a new tiredness in the people around me. Something has fundamentally changed.

Shukan ST: Sept. 28, 2001

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