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Brady Hall has a red, white and blue cow bank on a shelf in his bedroom. From his closet, his mom pulls out a framed photo of the Statue of Liberty featuring a quote from Abe Lincoln.
Brady and his dad, for a Boy Scout project, baked a cake in the shape of the White House.
And anytime the family encounters servicemen, like at the airport, the fourth-grader walks right up to them to shake hands.
This is not just a patriotic kid. Brady is a 9/11 baby, born on September 11, 2001, the darkest day most Americans can remember. On a list of tragic days in US history, it’s right up there with November 22, 1963, the day president John F Kennedy was assassinated, and December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour.
Today, Brady turns 10. He, along with 13,000 other Americans born that day in 2001, knows only what he has been told about 9/11, what he has seen on TV and the Internet, read in books.
Brady, who lives with parents Joy and Darin Hall and little brother Cooper in Shawnee, Kansas, realises his birthday is something special. “I’m just lucky I wasn’t in New York being born, that’s for sure,” he says.
And no, he doesn’t spend any time wishing his big day was, oh, September 10 or September 12.
“I’m just perfect for the birthday I got,” Brady says. “I’m just happy that I’ve been born, pretty much.”
With the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks falling today, 9/11/01 kids are in the spotlight. Five are featured in a BBC documentary shot by London filmmaker Holly Cocker; one of her subjects is a girl from Olpe, Kansas, near Emporia.
And Christine Pisera Naman has followed up her 2002 book about 50 babies born that day, Faces of Hope, with Faces of Hope 10 Years Later. (One of the children in the first book, Christina Taylor Green, was killed in January in the Tucson shootings that injured US Representative Gabrielle Giffords.)
Meanwhile, a soon-to-be 20-year-old woman in Newton, Massachusetts, started a website, www.birthdayspirit.org, for anyone of any age whose birthday is September 11. Part of the mission of Dahlia Gruen’s website is to encourage people born on 9/11 to “reclaim our day for good”.
Families of children born on 9/11/01 say they’re used to remarks, insensitive and otherwise, about the date.
“I did have a lot of people who irritated me after he was born,” says Brady Hall’s mom, Joy, who was in Shawnee Mission Medical Center in Kansas for a scheduled C-section the day of the attacks.
“Ooooh.” A pained look. A sympathetic shake of the head.
What goes unsaid, usually, is that September 11, 2001, was an awful day to be born, a bad birthday.
“If we continue to have this,” Hall says, “then to me that means the terrorists win.”
The Halls visited New York for Christmas last year. “When I saw ground zero,” Brady says, “my heart was just pounding.”
Jordan Hollon, too, turns 10 today. “Oh, that (stinks),” someone will tell one of his parents when they do the math, figure out he was born that day.
In the living room of their Kansas City home, Derick Hollon turns to his son. “It’s supposed to be your day,” he says, “and it’s overshadowed.”
That Tuesday in September 2001, “I remember thinking, what are we bringing this baby into?” Derick says.
Since Jordan was little, Derick and his wife, Letty, have talked to him about the events of September 11. Jordan got a kick out of looking through his baby book, having it read to him.
On “The Day Our Baby Was Born” page, Derick neatly penned the world headline: “New York WTC and the Pentagon were bombed.”
“It got bombed?” a 4-year-old Jordan would ask. “What do you mean it got bombed?”
In the living room, in plastic, the family keeps a copy of that day’s extra edition of The Kansas City Star: AMERICA UNDER ATTACK, the front page declares.
“I didn’t know about it when I was born,” Jordan says, looking thoughtful. But ask him about 9/11 and he’ll tell you: “Bin Laden sent people to blow up the twin towers. It was pretty scary.”
He’d wanted to become an Army Ranger when he grows up. But hearing his mom and dad and a visitor discuss thousands of people dying, Jordan changes his mind.
“I don’t want to get killed,” he says softly. “I like my life.”
Emily Cory was born September 11, 2001, at Menorah Medical Center in Kansas, but she wasn’t the first “event baby” for Jane and Joe Cory of Kansas City. Eldest child Katherine was born on the eve of Y2K, December 31, 1999. (The Corys’ third child, Joey, 4, arrived on a normal day.)
There’s one upside to being born on September 11, Jane says: People can remember Emily’s birthday.
Jane doesn’t talk to Emily too much about the day she was born. Now, at the dining room table, Jane explains to the fourth-grader why the two World Trade Center towers collapsed.
“(Each plane) hit up high, and the heat from the plane and the weight. ... The buildings just structurally fell down,” Jane tells her daughter. “Like, when you stack blocks?”
In the hospital, Jane pondered the circle of life as she held her newborn close.
“This girl,” Jane says, looking at her now almost-10-year-old, “took a lot of souls. There were a whole lot of people who died that day who needed babies to be born for them.”
In Leawood, Kansas, the Occhipinto family feels much the same way. Their son, Alex, was born in Phoenix. His parents, Tonya and Michael, were from the Kansas City area and moved back here in 2003. Alex has a younger sister, Sophia, 6.
On September 12, 2001, Tonya was still in the hospital when a lockdown was announced following a 9/11 copycat bomb threat.
Those first few days after her son’s birth seemed dreamlike, she says. For a while, when she was home alone with the baby, she watched nothing on TV but reality-free sitcoms like The Andy Griffith Show.
“It’s kind of a bittersweet thing,” Tonya says. “So many horrible things happened that day.
“But we have this beautiful child. I think it kind of provided hope for our family. On that horrible day it gave something for someone to smile about.”
She’s hoping that as time goes by, September 11 will become just another day. “It won’t sting as bad” by the 20th anniversary, she predicts.
As for Alex, he wouldn’t mind moving his birthday to Halloween or Christmas.
“All I know is, it’s an important day,” he says. “Because I was born ... “
“ ... and because people died,” his mother says.
Joy Hall, who named her 9/11 baby’s first Build-A-Bear Rudy Giuliani in honour of the former New York mayor, says Brady’s birth put her family’s lives into perspective.
“You don’t take things for granted,” she says. “Life is short. Celebrate the moment.” — The Kansas City Star/MCT