Community

Tapping into emotion at WVU vigil marking 9/11 anniversary

MORGANTOWN - There's a mostly paraphrased quote out there attributed to Robert Frost that goes something like this: "Poetry makes you remember what you didn't know you knew."

It definitely went like that for Joshua Lugo Zambrano, late Friday morning on the downtown campus of West Virginia University.

Zambrano tapped into emotions he didn't know he had.

That's when the senior music performance major from Chantilly, Va., brought his trumpet at the ready, so he could play Taps for the fallen of Sept. 11.

WVU marked the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that morning.

Taps.

Twenty-four notes.

Each with an aching elegy of loss.

And all for the victims taken away that Tuesday morning 25 years ago that began with a sky that couldn't have been more blue.

It's impossible for Zambrano to have an actual memory from that day. He's 21.

So he made one - real, valid - by way of music.

"Honestly, my mind was blank when I was playing, in that I was just focusing on the notes and performance," he said.

"I wanted to get this right. It was a matter of respect."

As the final note of those 24 notes wafted out, however, Zambrano began to consider the history of 9/11 and the reason for the campus observance.

That's how it works for him, he said.

For him, he said, music makes mind-bridges and cognitive imprints.

On this day 25 years ago, America was under attack.

Two passenger planes were deliberately flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Another made a suicide dive into the Pentagon - and a fourth plane was believed to have been headed for the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., on a similar mission before its passengers rose against their hijackers.

That plane crashed into a field in rural Pennsylvania, not that far from Morgantown, relatively speaking.

Nearly 3,000 died in the initial assaults, with others succumbing later to the trauma, physically and emotionally.

Zambrano had heard the accounts of first responders running in the direction of the smoke and flames - and of the Flight 93 citizen-soldiers storming the cockpit door of their doomed flight.

Performing Taps made for a sonically soulful imprint, he said.

"People were brave that day," he said. "And compassionate."

Twenty-four notes.