I was going to write about something else until I read my friend Mark’s blog post today about 9/11. Why ignore something I, and probably a lot of other people, are thinking about? I can’t believe it happened eight years ago. What a different time it was, and what a different person I was.
The first major incident of the day happened while I was trying to stay awake in an early morning Structural Geology class. (Note to geology professors everywhere: if the class is before 10 am, please keep the showing of rock photo slides in a dark room to a minimum…otherwise even nerds like me drift off.) I got out of class and that particular day, my parents were stopping by my college on their way to some sort of business conference. Since I grew up about five hours drive away, this was not a regular occurence.
We saw the footage on a large television in the common area of my dorm. Figuring it was a fluke and hungering for a greasy breakfast, we decided to go to my favorite diner (Uncle Moe’s in Sabattus) and eat.
I ordered my favorite dish (crepes) and my parents ordered theirs. We were the only people in the restaurant and the radio was turned up. More planes. More groundings. More craziness. We ended up choking down our food in silence. One of us made a comment that it felt like the world was ending. Nobody said otherwise.
My parentes hesitantly dropped me back off at my college (I insisted I couldn’t miss class) and headed back home in the opposite direction of their conference. Like everyone else, my family and I were all glued to the television for days after. Trying to figure out what it meant, and what it meant to us.
To this day, I can’t ignore terrible events in the background noise of life, which I suppose is a good thing. And those crepes were never really good to me again the way they were before. It’s amazing how a memory can affect all your senses, even the seemingly unrelated ones.
I think that as a country, we learned to live for the day. More people said ‘I love you’, were kind to one another, and other positive actions reverberated days and months after.
So while today, I can’t forget the feeling that the world was ending, I remember also that attitude that came after and try to hold it in my memory in equal measure.
Where were you that day, and what do you remember?
“ For some reason, this was never that big a deal to me.Perhaps its because I had just moved across the country, my first real move, more than an hour or two away from home, and was already feeling vulnerable, out of sorts, and not knowing what to expect next.Perhaps it was because I didn’t yet have a TV, continue to not have cable, and so still have never seen the infamous footage of the planes hitting the tower and people jumping from the windows.Perhaps its because, at the bar where I did go that evening to attempt to catch the news, one of the first things I heard spoken was a broad-brush racist remark directed at all members of one of the worlds major religions.Perhaps it is because I’ve never had a soft spot for globalization or our defence department, and thought what happened, while terrible, was not really that unexpected considering our global footprint.Perhaps it was because things in Israel were really unstable at the time, and every day leading up to 9/11 (and after) I would hear about scores of innocent civilians dying at the hands of either terrorists or the israeli military, and in a way, made our story no more important than theirs, except that it was here, not there.Or perhaps it was the display of ultra-patriotism – to the point where it was actually pretty unpatriotic, that kind of ruined it for me. To elaborate – I remember where I was (suburban NYC) it was not unusual to see things like a car with a flag draped over its hood, stained, tattered, and bug-smeared, six months after the event. Nice way to show your respect. All of these things togeher kind of deadened the experience to me. Thats not to say that it wasn’t a terrible, misplaced attack on innocent civilians and that there wasn’t a ton of heroism shown that day. But it has just never resonated much with me. “
“ I was asleep, I had worked the night shift so I had gone to bed maybe an hour before the first series of attacks. A friend woke me up asking if I was watching television, I turned on the television to see a human figure jumping out of a window. I was in shock, I just sat in front of the television wondering, Why? and Who?? I’m still wondering why and who and I think it’s so important never to forget the tragedy, the families of those innocent victims never will. “