Anniversary

I took some time deciding whether or not I wanted to post something today. Those of you who have been with me for awhile know that I don’t post on the weekends, but it seemed like a good time to make an exception.


Like everyone else, I still remember where I was on the morning of 9/11/2001. Hubby had me sit down and write out exactly where I was and what I was doing so that Kiddo would have an idea of what the day was like. I wrote it all out before Halloween of that year, and we put it away with the newspapers from the next day. You know the ones – where every.single.picture was of the towers exploding. It’s been in the hopechest since then. K has never really asked much about it, and I don’t bring it up.

Before I go into this, I want to say a couple of things. First of all, I am still deeply affected by what happened on that day. Second, I wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if there is some big government coverup or if it was exactly what it appeared to be. I’m not going to go into it. I don’t think it matters. Or, at least, not to me. The fact is, it happened. It was a tragedy and it was terrifying and overwhelming, and honestly, it still is.

That morning, I was at work in what we now refer to as “the real job”. I had a corporate position and I worked in a high-rise downtown. Our offices were on the 36th floor of 40. We didn’t have internet access or radios or any kind of news reporting, so we had no idea anything was going on until people started calling in. One woman’s mother called and said we were under attack. Someone else said it was World War III. Yet another said it was a movie being filmed that had freaked everyone out. Nobody really had any idea at that point. We were all just going along.

We were required to take a break at certain times each day. My break time was at 10:45. I smoked then, so every day, I’d take the elevators down to the plaza so I could have my smoke and then go back and work my day. It was that time, so the 10:45 people walked out and went downstairs. Of course, the only thing we were talking about was what was going on. Our building was across the street from a federal courthouse and on the other side of the block from the city’s federal building. Our own building held FBI offices, a CIA branch and several IRS offices.

While we were out smoking, people started pouring out of the buildings around us. There were SWAT teams and police and emergency personnel directing staff to waiting buses and cars and vans and getting them off the properties. Please remember that we were only outside for about 12 minutes and all of this is going on. It was scary. I had pretty much decided that I was going to try and get some calls out and get some information. I felt like I was surrounded by chaos and I needed to be grounded. Does that sound alarmist or overly dramatic? I’m sorry. I can’t think of the words I really want to use there, but that’s about as close as I can get.

We all went back upstairs – reluctantly, I assure you. And as we walked in, our VP was in the midst of dismissing everyone. At that time, it was becoming more clear that we were, for lack of a better term, indeed under some sort of attack and the company wanted to make sure we were out of downtown. I called my mother and asked her to go and pick up K at school. My little girl was in Kindergarten and I just knew that I was going to want her with me, regardless of what was going on.

Several people were going to go out to lunch and asked me to come with them. I remember thinking that it was unreasonable to want to be out in public. How could someone NOT want to get home immediately and hide under the bed? At any rate, I got into my car and raced to my mother’s house. At this point, I still had no idea what was going on. I hadn’t had access to the news or pictures or internet or anything. I knew that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, but I couldn’t imagine what that looked like or anything. When I got to mom’s, the news was on, of course. They were replaying the footage of the first plane hitting the north tower. It was literally one of those times where you just fall over from the shock of it. I was standing in the kitchen and then I was sitting on the floor in the kitchen. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the screen. It was overwhelming.

Kiddo was in the playroom and while I wanted to grab her up and race to our own house, at the same time, I was terrified to leave the shelter of my mother’s house. I wanted to be safe, but I wanted to be in my own house with my child and my husband. I wanted to close my eyes and just wake up there. I didn’t want to be on the road, I didn’t want to be in public. I had no idea where the next disaster was going to strike. To add a little bit more information to the scant amount I’ve provided, I live in a big city. It was totally feasible that I could be in the center of another attack. In the end, I knew I would have to go home, and I just figured that I wasn’t going to be any safer in an hour or two than I was at around noon, so I went home.

I remember every second of that drive. There was no one on the roads. What normally took me about twenty minutes to get home only lasted about ten. The whole time, I'm whipping my head around trying to see everything that is going around all at once. I got home, got the K into her room and occupied, and planted my ass on the couch. I think I stayed there for hours. I remember clinging to H when he got home. We didn’t really talk, we just watched television. It was like we couldn’t get enough information. We wanted to know exactly what had happened and why and how someone could DARE?!? do something like this to us. US – the United States of America.

You just don’t attack the US. We’ve proved through history that we will eat your face for that shit. It’s the way we do things, for better or for worse. As an American, you feel this sense of entitlement, this sense of being above it all. 9/11 put us in our places, as I’m sure it was meant to do.

I don’t want to go into everything that happened after that. The wars, the recriminations, the conspiracy theories, the fundraisers and specials. I just wanted to share my own story. And now I have.

I appreciate you coming along on this one.

I promise that next week, we’ll get back to the ridiculousness that is my life.

Brightest Blessings.