Remembering

Five years ago, I sat on the couch watching Court TV and jotting down some ideas for my on-going job search. I had an interview scheduled for the afternoon, for a job that I didn’t know much about, but sounded promising. The phone rang, I answered it and my husband said “Are you watching TV?” When I said I was, he said “Pretty bizarre, hunh?” I wasn’t sure what he meant, since I watch TV rather frequently, and he didn’t know what I was watching (court coverage of a murder trial from Florida). He asked what channel I was watching and told me to put on CNN. You know what I saw. A building with a huge gaping hole, black smoke pouring out. “A plane hit it” he said. I don’t remember what I said. At some point, we hung up. I switched to NBC, I don’t know why, I guess to verify that it was true. I was watching when the second plane hit. That’s when I started to cry. And I got scared. M lived in NYC then, and worked not too far from there. I kept thinking, we’re at war, we’re under attack! I tried to call M, but of course, couldn’t get through. I saw people jumping or falling from the building. I ran upstairs to our computer, but there was no TV in that room, so I got the tiny portable TV my husband bought me when I worked in radio. I got online and started to cry again when M responded to my IMs. She was alive, she was safe, she was okay. I told her I’d call her parents and her husband’s family to let them know both were okay. The planes hitting the Pentagon and the one that went down in Somerset, the buildings themselves coming down, the news saying as many as 40,000 people could still be in the buildings when they collapsed, the people running, screaming, covered in the awful dust that made the scene even more nightmarish, I don’t need to recap it for you. I can’t tell you what order things happened in, they are just images burned into my brain. The world became a scarier place. Friends from all over called – were we safe? They said that plane went down near Pittsburgh? I cried and cried. I shook, trying to make sense of it. I prayed, not even praying words. Some things I remember: *IMing M “My God, we’re at war. We’re at war.” *My interviewer calling to cancel my interview (on autopilot, I asked her when she’d like to reschedule - later she said that’s when she knew how much I wanted the job). *I took both cars to fill them up with gas, because they kept saying on the news that if this was an attack by Mid-East terrorists, gas prices would be sky-high in days. The guy at the station said “Those a-holes! We should bomb that whole area flat! Make it a parking lot!” *Flags popping up everywhere overnight. *The expected death toll going up, up and then mercifully down and down. *The first time after the attack that a plane went overhead. I was at the T stop waiting to go into town with a few other people. How ordinary a plane going by had been, but when it went over, we all looked up. Every person there watched that plane, a mix of fear and triumph on their faces. *The woman who called a talk show the next day, afraid to let her 8-year-old go on a school field trip to LegoLand, because “what if the terrorists hit there next?” *The news coverage of celebrations in the Mid East. *I remember what a beautiful day it had been. I didn’t lose anyone – all the people I knew who could have been in the Pentagon or the Twin Towers were elsewhere, for whatever reasons - thank God. I still feel such loss – we all lost that day. We say we’ll never forget, but what did you do last Pearl Harbor day? Do you know what day that even is? Another horrible attack on American soil – people dying slowly trapped in metal structures. We say we’ll never forget. I pray we don’t.