At 9:04 a.m. the phone rang. I was in bed; mom had taken The Boy after his 7:00 feeding and was doing what she seemed to love best, sitting with him asleep on her lap in the den and letting me catch a few more precious minutes of sleep. I answered the phone, planning a blistering, if incoherent, dressing-down to the telemarketer on the other end.
But it wasn't a telemarketer, it was my husband, telling me excitedly to go, turn on the TV, he'd just heard that a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center and that it might not have been an accident. I hung up and stumbled into the den and grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. It was on Fox News, and the images of the first tower were just coming in. I told mom what had happened, and then we sat in silence, watching palefaced journalists trying to filter through the morass of information and rumors.
They had a live shot on the towers, so we saw the second plane hit. Mom and I both gasped, "Oh my God!" and looked at each other. My thoughts were a jumble--this wasn't accidental, this was an attack, how many people, how would they get them out, where were the rescue helicopters, for Gods' sake--shouldn't there be rescue helicopters to take folks off the towers? How would they put out a fire that high up?
We sat there, transfixed, as information about other planes and the Pentagon came in, all the while watching the images of burning towers behind the anchorman's head. They had pulled back to a wide shot, perhaps so that we couldn't see the falling bodies. And then I saw the first tower fall. It took a moment for the journalists to catch up with what was happening behind them, but I remember gasping and telling my husband (who I had called after turning on the TV) and my mother (who had gone to make coffee) "My God! The tower just fell! It FELL!" And then we sat in silence, waiting for the inevitable to happen, and watching as the second one came down.
Everything else about that day is something of a blur. I remember looking at my two week old son and thinking that the world had changed, and that it might be up to him to fight for it. I remember going outside and noticing how clear and calm and silent everything was--I didn't hear birds singing or distant sounds of traffic or anything--and thinking that this might be the world holding its breath, waiting to see what was going to happen next. I remember the TV as our constant companion, speeches of leaders who rose to the occasion, and the roll call of the confirmed dead and the missing, and all of the children who would never know a father or who had lost a mother. I remember sadness, and rage, but most of all, I remember the feeling of solidarity I had with people hundreds of miles away.
Two years later, I still remember.
Posted by Big Arm Woman at September 11, 2003 08:23 AMI have a child who was born pre-9/11 and one born 5 months after 9/11...one born in the 20th and one in the 21st century. Neither of them will understand the terror that day and in the next few of hearing planes that weren't supposed to be flying overhead or of opening envelopes delivered by gloved postmen @ arm's length in case they were filled w/Anthrax. Yes, everything changed for the adults that day, but our job is to make sure our children don't get gripped w/the sudden paranoia and fear we had to endure by not facing reality sooner. We all grew up that day, whether we wanted to or not.
Posted by: Paula at September 11, 2003 12:31 PM