9/11 made normalcy disapppear for a time
I'm too young to remember the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr., and I have only vague memories of the first man on the moon. But I can remember so much about 9/11, so many details about that surreal day.
The first recollection is of my then 2-year-old daughter running into the kitchen saying, "Mommy, T.B., T.B." ... seems our TV, hooked up to an antenna for local channels that did not come free with the satellite dish ... stopped working right in the middle of Sesame Street. I figured something was wrong with the antenna and just switched on the dish and didn't think anything more until a few minutes later when my husband called and said two planes had hit the World Trade Center, where the broadcast signals came from.
My first thought was it must have been small single-engine Cessna-type planes or gliders. I even had split-second images of them bouncing off those massive buildings and worried about who they might have landed on below. Then I turned on CNN.
I was due at work about 10, and I didn't want to go in. Two of my kids were in school, and now I had to drop off my third at the sitter's. I lingered there awhile, and we could see the smoke from our positions by the Shark River. It was eerie, and the enormity of it all still had yet to hit me.
A strange thing happened about an hour after I got to work. I was Community editor, and someone called in asking how to get a November bus trip into our calendar. "She must not have heard," I thought, and after telling her where to send the blurb, I said, "I really can't talk, there's a lot going on, I don't know if you've watched the news yet today." She said, "Oh yes, that's really horrible, I imagine you must be busy there." I was stunned. Why would she pick that morning to call about a bus trip taking place two months later? Maybe it was her way of pretending it wasn't really happening.
Did anyone else, after the third and fourth planes crashed, wonder if it was going to go on all day? I thought we'd hear of planes crashing every hour. I just wanted my family ... my folks were stuck in Germany, their Sept. 12 flight canceled. They made it home the night of Sept. 15, and they were lucky to get in that soon. A French student stranded at the airport tried to get me to sing "La Marseillaise" with him at the coffee station there when I told him I took French in high school. That, and the Hail Mary, are pretty much all I remember. The Hail Mary would have been more appropriate, but less entertaining for those around us.
It was such a strange time. I was horrifyingly fascinated with the news. I couldn't take my eyes off the TV for days. I remember for the next few days, making a point to go out to the window at work and stare at the planeless sky, knowing that the week earlier I could find one easily by looking up at any time of the day.
Our plans to have another baby just got put by the wayside. Who wanted to bring another baby into such a strange world? We healed, though. That's why our youngest is entering his first year of preschool, and not his second.
The first recollection is of my then 2-year-old daughter running into the kitchen saying, "Mommy, T.B., T.B." ... seems our TV, hooked up to an antenna for local channels that did not come free with the satellite dish ... stopped working right in the middle of Sesame Street. I figured something was wrong with the antenna and just switched on the dish and didn't think anything more until a few minutes later when my husband called and said two planes had hit the World Trade Center, where the broadcast signals came from.
My first thought was it must have been small single-engine Cessna-type planes or gliders. I even had split-second images of them bouncing off those massive buildings and worried about who they might have landed on below. Then I turned on CNN.
I was due at work about 10, and I didn't want to go in. Two of my kids were in school, and now I had to drop off my third at the sitter's. I lingered there awhile, and we could see the smoke from our positions by the Shark River. It was eerie, and the enormity of it all still had yet to hit me.
A strange thing happened about an hour after I got to work. I was Community editor, and someone called in asking how to get a November bus trip into our calendar. "She must not have heard," I thought, and after telling her where to send the blurb, I said, "I really can't talk, there's a lot going on, I don't know if you've watched the news yet today." She said, "Oh yes, that's really horrible, I imagine you must be busy there." I was stunned. Why would she pick that morning to call about a bus trip taking place two months later? Maybe it was her way of pretending it wasn't really happening.
Did anyone else, after the third and fourth planes crashed, wonder if it was going to go on all day? I thought we'd hear of planes crashing every hour. I just wanted my family ... my folks were stuck in Germany, their Sept. 12 flight canceled. They made it home the night of Sept. 15, and they were lucky to get in that soon. A French student stranded at the airport tried to get me to sing "La Marseillaise" with him at the coffee station there when I told him I took French in high school. That, and the Hail Mary, are pretty much all I remember. The Hail Mary would have been more appropriate, but less entertaining for those around us.
It was such a strange time. I was horrifyingly fascinated with the news. I couldn't take my eyes off the TV for days. I remember for the next few days, making a point to go out to the window at work and stare at the planeless sky, knowing that the week earlier I could find one easily by looking up at any time of the day.
Our plans to have another baby just got put by the wayside. Who wanted to bring another baby into such a strange world? We healed, though. That's why our youngest is entering his first year of preschool, and not his second.
1 Comments:
As far as 9-11 tributes go, the following one has to be one of the best. Please turn on your speakers and see for yourself.
Remember The Blood of Heroes
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