My memory of 9/11
Construction at the site of the former World Trade Center, July 2008
Les at A Tidewater Gardener asks where we were 10 years ago on 9/11. I remember clearly. I had gotten my son off to kindergarten and was back at home with my 18-month-old. In a couple of hours I needed to go pick up my mother at the airport; she was flying in from Tulsa for a visit. The phone rang, and my mother-in-law asked, “Have you heard? You’d better turn on the TV.”
Both towers were smoking. A confusion of commentary from reporters. A correspondent in D.C. came on and said, “There’s a fire at the Pentagon.” Back to New York: a replay of the 2nd plane hitting the tower. My daughter, playing on the floor at my feet, looked up at the TV and said, “Airplane went boom.”
I thought of my son and called the school office, but they convinced me not to come. I phoned my husband at work and then my father, halfway across the country. I tried to call my mother, flying somewhere over Texas, but could only reach her voice mail.
I rang up a friend, who was planning her preschooler’s birthday party for that afternoon. She didn’t have a TV, so I told her what was happening, and mid-sentence, my eyes glued to the screen, I saw the 2nd tower shiver strangely and begin to pancake on itself. “Oh my god,” was all I could say. I was conscious of ruining her son’s birthday.
My mother called to say that she had reached Dallas but her flight to Austin was canceled. She didn’t know why. “Get to a car rental desk as fast as you can,” I urged. But the rentals were all gone. We called my father-in-law, who lived in Dallas, to ask if he could pick her up. He not only picked her up but drove her down to Austin.
The next day Mom and I sat in the back yard watching my daughter play. The sky was silent and still, which was strange. We ate lunch at Shady Grove, feeling somehow disloyal for thinking of eating out. The staff was subdued. I felt that everything had changed but also that I had a clarity of understanding about the world now.
Ten years later I can still recall that vibrating sense of clarity, though the feeling has faded. My children have never known a pre-9/11 world. They don’t have the memory of “where I was when 9/11 happened.” I hope they never know a moment like it.
All material © 2006-2011 by Pam Penick for Digging. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.
Pam — I was just thinking of you and David as it is Ironman time again. As for 9/11, I was in the newsroom that day so my experience was a bit different in the sense that it was the clear that it was about to be the biggest story any of us would ever experience. I was an editorial writer and I had been working with the former head of the Wisconsin prison system on a big piece for the oped page about the need for prison reform. I knew that story would never be read now. What I didn’t know was that the man who wrote it was driving to NYC by the time the paper came out as his brother worked in the twin towers. It was one of many examples of six degrees of separation that occurred related to the attack.
You mentioned one of the things that I still remember clearly: “The sky was silent and still, which was strange.” We were living, as we do now, in the foothills outside of San Diego. We don’t ordinarily hear a lot of air traffic, except from a small, municipal airfield nearby which was, of course, not operating either. That day, and for the couple of days after, the sky was, very definitely, silent and still.
That was really beautiful, Pam.
The silence of the skies was another memorable point of that time. We lived at that time south of DFW airport. We could stand at our front bedroom window and look straight out at planes taking off toward the south. We had a boat at the time, and decided a few days after the attack we’d had as much of the story as we could handle. So we took a picnic dinner and went out on the lake. The skies that were usually full of planes taking off or circling for landing, were quiet. Then, suddenly a plane came up on the northern horizon. I never knew watching an airplane take off, could evoke such emotion. A symbol that things would get back to normal…albeit, a new kind of normal.
It’s a time none of us will forget.
Stay safe….
It was a defining moment that seems so long ago and so recent at the same time. It’s hard to believe it’s already been ten years. Life in many ways is much different since that day.
As a grandma of two with two more on the way, I hope children too young to remember, or born after 9/ll/01 never have to know a moment like that. If they ever do, I hope the kind of unity and connection born of such a profound event is far less fleeting afterwards than it was after 9/11.
It is hard to believe it has been ten years since 9/11. The memory of that day is still so very clear. The previous generation knows horror all too well with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Can we, as a people, understand and receive ‘clarity’ without such an experience? I do hope so.
Thank you for responding. I was actually in NYC a few days before September 11, 2001. The air was crisp and dry, and I remember commenting how incredibly clear everything looked. A few days later, hell was unleashed. I posted my own remembrance on my blog. Wishing you all peace.
Pam, thank you very much for the link. I managed to collect some very detailed remembrances in the comment section of my post. Yours portray many of the same feelings I had and those of others. Thank you again.