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tarotgalFor years now, I've noticed this wonderful thing that happens like magic whenever someone mentions 9-11. The mood in a group or conversation completely changes. It softens. The memory hurts us all. And then, suddenly, people start sharing where they were when it happened and how they found it. Ten years later, people still talk about it. We have a need to share--with friends, with family, even with people we've just met. And we have a need to listen. Even if we didn't know anyone personally who died, it still touched us--and continues to touch us. It's something we all share and something we all have to remember. There is power in remembering.
Please feel free to comment here with your own story.
This is mine.
I was in Operating Sytems class, taught by the head of the Virginia Tech computer science department that morning. After class, I walked over to McBride to meet with my adviser. I ran into him in the elevator on the way up to the CS floor. Someone said that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. Someone said it was a small plane and possibly the person in the plane had died. It sounded like some accident involving faulty navigation or a noncommercial plane. When my adviser and I got to his office, we tried to pull up CNN and then all the other news sources, but everything timed out with too much traffic overloading their servers. My adviser and I had a super quick meeting, thinking nothing more of it. Afterward, there was something to sign--a form or timesheet for my graduate research hours or something like that. So we headed to the main CS office. And that's when we realized something was very wrong.
One of the office interns was in tears. Everyone was listening to the radio or scrolling through news stories. The plane had not been a little one.
I headed home, but I needed to get gas to get 1 mile up the hill to my apartment. I stopped at the gas station at the bottom of the hill, just off campus, and tried my credit card. The reader was down. That was odd. I tried again with a different card. Still nothing. Luckily, I had $3 in cash, which was enough for gas to get home and back.
I got to my apartment and turned on ABC just as the second tower fell.
Fom then on, I was glued to the television set. Peter Jennings was like my lifeline. I called my mother up in Northern Virginia. She said my dad (a government employee) was fine. I can't remember now if he'd been sent home and was on the beltway somewhere or if there was a lockdown for a little while. But I remember being worried about him until she called me and told me he was home safe. That was after the towers fell. And after the plane hit the Pentagon. And after the plane went down in Pennsylvania. Every single second of the day, I watched the news. I'd turn the volume up so I could hear it from the bathroom even. I just sat there watching and crying and hoping.
I remember that night, when my boyfriend and I finally ventured outside. The streets were empty. We drove over to our favorite Japanese takeout place for dinner. We ordered and then sat there watching the TV that was on. Other people were sitting at the little tables, silently eating and watching the news coverage as well. I had this sense that, though the news was just showing the same thing over and over, there was something about watching it that was reassuring. It was quiet and strange. Maybe it was just that no one had words for it yet. No one knew how to talk. So we all just watched and waited for it to make sense.
I remember sleeping in front of the television. I remember waking up repeatedly to updated death & missing totals.
I remember going to Creative Writing class the next afternoon. We didn't talk about the current assignment. We didn't talk about the class at all, actually. The professor (a graduate assistant, I think, or maybe he was just a really young teacher) waited for us all to sit down and then he said that the lesson was canceled but we could just sit and write or sit and talk about it with each other. And so people shared. We talked about where we'd been and what we knew so far. We talked about how we all watched the news or listened to the news. We were a small class of people who didn't know each other because it was mostly non-majors taking this for a core requirement, but we all had this shared experience. We reacted to it differently but also in the same way. It was cathartic to be away from the television and talking about it. It was nice having a chance to share our emotions and thoughts with other people who understood.
I can't remember how long it took me to stop watching the news coverage 24-7. I can't remember turning off the television or switching the channel. I just remember life stopping and the whole world holding its breath in shock, then crying. The images of all those flyers of people missing. The president saying stupid things about going shopping. The seriousness even the Daily Show had. Everything was suddenly categorized as Before or After. I wasn't alive when JFK was killed, but soon 9-11 became an actual term everyone used, and then it became the defining event.
I visited Ground Zero for the first time a few weeks ago. I ended up following a group of a few hundred (a few thousand?) motorcycle riders there for a remembrance ceremony. I was amazed at how far along the construction of new buildings is. But I appreciate the displays and museum (which wasn't open yet). And I appreciated having a chance to just be there to quietly reflect. On the drive back home that same day, we passed the Pentagon. And it's rebuilt and functioning. For all the horror and loss and suffering--the lives lost on board the plans, in the towers, in the aftermath; the families destroyed; the first responders now developing illnesses; the soldiers and casualties in the Middle East--we're still here. We all still remember.
Please feel free to comment here with your own story.
This is mine.
I was in Operating Sytems class, taught by the head of the Virginia Tech computer science department that morning. After class, I walked over to McBride to meet with my adviser. I ran into him in the elevator on the way up to the CS floor. Someone said that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. Someone said it was a small plane and possibly the person in the plane had died. It sounded like some accident involving faulty navigation or a noncommercial plane. When my adviser and I got to his office, we tried to pull up CNN and then all the other news sources, but everything timed out with too much traffic overloading their servers. My adviser and I had a super quick meeting, thinking nothing more of it. Afterward, there was something to sign--a form or timesheet for my graduate research hours or something like that. So we headed to the main CS office. And that's when we realized something was very wrong.
One of the office interns was in tears. Everyone was listening to the radio or scrolling through news stories. The plane had not been a little one.
I headed home, but I needed to get gas to get 1 mile up the hill to my apartment. I stopped at the gas station at the bottom of the hill, just off campus, and tried my credit card. The reader was down. That was odd. I tried again with a different card. Still nothing. Luckily, I had $3 in cash, which was enough for gas to get home and back.
I got to my apartment and turned on ABC just as the second tower fell.
Fom then on, I was glued to the television set. Peter Jennings was like my lifeline. I called my mother up in Northern Virginia. She said my dad (a government employee) was fine. I can't remember now if he'd been sent home and was on the beltway somewhere or if there was a lockdown for a little while. But I remember being worried about him until she called me and told me he was home safe. That was after the towers fell. And after the plane hit the Pentagon. And after the plane went down in Pennsylvania. Every single second of the day, I watched the news. I'd turn the volume up so I could hear it from the bathroom even. I just sat there watching and crying and hoping.
I remember that night, when my boyfriend and I finally ventured outside. The streets were empty. We drove over to our favorite Japanese takeout place for dinner. We ordered and then sat there watching the TV that was on. Other people were sitting at the little tables, silently eating and watching the news coverage as well. I had this sense that, though the news was just showing the same thing over and over, there was something about watching it that was reassuring. It was quiet and strange. Maybe it was just that no one had words for it yet. No one knew how to talk. So we all just watched and waited for it to make sense.
I remember sleeping in front of the television. I remember waking up repeatedly to updated death & missing totals.
I remember going to Creative Writing class the next afternoon. We didn't talk about the current assignment. We didn't talk about the class at all, actually. The professor (a graduate assistant, I think, or maybe he was just a really young teacher) waited for us all to sit down and then he said that the lesson was canceled but we could just sit and write or sit and talk about it with each other. And so people shared. We talked about where we'd been and what we knew so far. We talked about how we all watched the news or listened to the news. We were a small class of people who didn't know each other because it was mostly non-majors taking this for a core requirement, but we all had this shared experience. We reacted to it differently but also in the same way. It was cathartic to be away from the television and talking about it. It was nice having a chance to share our emotions and thoughts with other people who understood.
I can't remember how long it took me to stop watching the news coverage 24-7. I can't remember turning off the television or switching the channel. I just remember life stopping and the whole world holding its breath in shock, then crying. The images of all those flyers of people missing. The president saying stupid things about going shopping. The seriousness even the Daily Show had. Everything was suddenly categorized as Before or After. I wasn't alive when JFK was killed, but soon 9-11 became an actual term everyone used, and then it became the defining event.
I visited Ground Zero for the first time a few weeks ago. I ended up following a group of a few hundred (a few thousand?) motorcycle riders there for a remembrance ceremony. I was amazed at how far along the construction of new buildings is. But I appreciate the displays and museum (which wasn't open yet). And I appreciated having a chance to just be there to quietly reflect. On the drive back home that same day, we passed the Pentagon. And it's rebuilt and functioning. For all the horror and loss and suffering--the lives lost on board the plans, in the towers, in the aftermath; the families destroyed; the first responders now developing illnesses; the soldiers and casualties in the Middle East--we're still here. We all still remember.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 02:31 pm (UTC)My roommate and I were down in the cafeteria having breakfast before our classes. We were about 1/2 way through our cereal when someone came into the cafeteria yelling: "they're bombing the pentagon, they're bombing the pentagon!"(while this statement turned out to be completely untrue, it did turn out to be an eerie foreshadow for the attack on the pentagon that day). Everyone in the cafeteria pretty much had the same response: forget the food and run upstairs to our rooms-- get to a TV to find out what was going on.
I got into my room just in time to see the second plane hit. I had class at 9:30 a.m. so I watched as long as I could before I had to leave. Every TV on campus was turned to the news. We spent the majority of my journalism class that morning talking about what happened. So much time, infant; that I was late to my next class that was at the complete other end of campus. When I finally arrived, my PSY teacher was standing outside of the empty classroom. She had tears in her eyes, put her hand on my shoulder and told me that all classes had been cancelled for the day and to go back to my dorm.
I will never forget walking onto my dorm room floor-- every door open, ever TV turned to the news... the echo of it down the hallway. We all huddled together that day. People from 16 rooms all trying to cram into one so no one had to be alone, no one had to suffer through what we were seeing without someone by their side.
My mom had flown to Vegas the day night of 9/10/01. She had yet to call us to check in. My father called to inform me that he had been unable to reach her since that morning. A large TV had been set up in the common area downstairs and I remember staring at the numbers of confirmed and suspected hijacked flights praying I wouldn't see hers. While I knew she has left the night before, my stomach was still in knots.
We ate together as a floor that night, came back upstairs and huddled around the TV like it was the only lifeline we had to the outside world. My mom did end up calling later that night, she and my aunt had been in the casinos since they arrived then went back for a nap... there were no TVs on the casino floor and they never turned the one in their room on so they had no idea what had happened until the night of 9/11.
We had so many people in our room at the time my dad called I never heard the phone right, just saw the light of the answering machine flick on. Everyone in my room went silent as we listened to my dad tell me that my mom was safe. Everyone in the room erupted in cheers and hugs, people I had only known a few weeks holding me close and telling me how glad they were she was o.k.
A week later I went home for the weekend so I could be with my dad when we picked my mom up from the airport. The scene at the airport was one of the scariest things I have ever felt-- it was night time and the road in was lined with police and dogs and security and they all questioned you ever three seconds, wanting to know why you were there and who you were picking up. My mom was waiting outside for us, we had enough time to get her into the car and throw her luggage into the trunk before a police man was yelling to start moving... start moving.
When I was in high school, my history teacher told us to go home and ask our parents where they were when JFK was shot. I remember thinking it was a crazy thought, that there was no way my parents would remember something like that. Only they did, in vivid detail.
It was only after 9/11 that I completely understand how they were able to do so. I know some day my children will come home, ask me where I was on September 11, 2001. And I know, without a doubt, that I will be able to tell them everything about that day in crystal clear detail.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 04:07 pm (UTC)There were a crowd of people clustered around the big TV. It only took a single glimpse of the screen to tell me why.
I have to find my mother.
I ran all the way back to the dorm. My roommate and my boyfriend were already watching the TV when I got in. My boyfriend got up and hugged me and I just started crying. I managed to hear from my mother, I think she called my dorm from a payphone. She said my father had been sent into the field to help organize the enormous problem of getting a million people home without a subway system. (He's a manager at the transit authority.)
She works in Jersey City, in a gorgeous building, then brand new, with a huge picture window looking out across the river at the financial district. She was already at her desk when it happened. Her co-worker said, "Oh my God, a plane is about to hit the World Trade Center."
She turned just in time to see it happen. By the time she stopped screaming, everyone on the floor was staring out that same window.
Finally, they got it back together. She and a colleague got downstairs, grabbed a train back to lower Manhattan and actually crossed the river and were back on the street before they shut down mass transit. They walked three miles to Penn Station, only to discover that those trains weren't running either, and the line for buses was impossibly long.
Instead, they ducked into the chapel of the monastery of St. Francis of Assisi on 32nd street. There, the monks had been conducting a quiet morning mass for a handful of the faithful when abruptly their church began to fill, with people quite literally covered in ash and shell-shocked, people who'd walked until their strength ran out, or perhaps just walked until they had no more direction.
In the blackout two years later, when she couldn't get home, she headed straight for the same church. My mother still tithes them a little, and she's not even Catholic.
I went home to see her I think the next day. You know, the worst thing I've ever seen were my mother's eyes that day. It wasn't just seeing her cry, it was like there was no more hope or sense left. May I never see the like again.
I was still at school, about two hours away. I went down to my club's lounge, answered the phone for a while. Mostly people calling to tell us they were alive, mostly people who just didn't want to be alone.
The funny one was a friend of mine, J, who'd just graduated, who called to tell us that he was at ABC news! He was attending medical school in Manhattan, you see, and the third and fourth year students had all been sent to the hospitals, but the first and second year students had been kicked out for the day. So his father, who worked at the news, called J to help him. Pretty random, but that's J. for you.