Issue link: http://latinschool.uberflip.com/i/510699
14 around school AND NOW, IN MEMORIUM. All my early memories sit at the bottom of a lake. Now and then I'll dive down for one and wait, patient and cross-legged, for it to come shyly out of the weeds. I see it eventually, moving through the water like ink, and soon enough it has me wrapped in its cloud. It's an uneasy experience, so I don't dive for memories often. But there is one I revisit more than all the others. It's my first memory, and it was the first time I saw my father cry. e news had just started, so it must have been sometime after dark. I was jumping on the sofa, and he was sitting in a chair in front of me. It was dark in the basement, except for the bright flashing of the TV. And my father's eyes, in my memory, are like moonlight on water. He was silent and still, and his eyes were all that betrayed him. I stopped jumping. I don't remember the images that made him cry – the clips of the twin towers crumbling, or the hideous black smoke – but I remember the moonlit eyes, and for the hour I stared at him, my dad looking at the TV, the TV flashing brightly on us both. I read somewhere that my age group is the last to remember 9/11, and I don't know what that means for us, but I think it's important. Maybe it's more important that, for many of us, it's the first thing we remember. Stronger than all the sights before it, an earliest memory is the first to have enough muscle to crack the skull. My father crying had the muscle, and it put such a crack in my head that ever since my mind's been splitting like ice. It wouldn't be that bad if when I write I didn't hold my pencil like an ice pick, and chip and chip and chip. But no matter My Story Around School 14 around school around school And Now, In Memoriam. Frani O'Toole '15