September 11th

September 11th, 2001.  Eleven years ago, today.  It is hard to believe that eleven years of sunrises and sunsets, breathing and eating and drinking and sleeping, eleven years of actual every-day living has actually followed that day.  It was a day that felt like the end of the world.

I don't remember what I was doing that day.  Everybody says they remember what they were doing when the first plane hit the World Trade Center; I don't.  It was just a day for me, and for my two boys.  They were still so little.  Can that be true?  R was only 3-and-3/4 years old, and B was only 1-and-a-half.  Yes, they were little.  I was doing something.  Maybe I was making them breakfast.  Maybe I was cleaning it up.  Did we eat that day?  We must have.  I don't remember.

My phone rang.

Most people that I know found out about the disaster through television.  They were watching this, or that, and the news broke in that a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center.  They were watching the reports, looking at that awful gash in the side of the building, when another plane crossed the screen and smashed into the other tower.  They spent the day watching horrible images -- images that only became the thing of nightmares after 9/11, because they were too unbelievable to have been imagined beforehand.

I answered my phone.

It was my friend, Diane.  She was one of those people watching television, and when the first plane hit she thought of me, because she knew we didn't have television reception at our house.  She had called to let me know what was on the news.  She didn't sound terribly upset at first.  We didn't really know enough yet to be upset.  We talked about what a terrible accident it must have been, wondered how big the plane was, if there were any passengers aboard.  We assumed it was a really inexperienced pilot, or that something had malfunctioned in the plane.  How sad, we said.  We hoped there were few injuries in the building.

And then, suddenly, Diane's tone changed.  She was agitated, almost gasping for air.  "Another plane!" she said.  "I just watched another plane hit the other tower!"

My mind reeled.  "It wasn't an accident," I said.

"It wasn't an accident," she agreed.  "And it wasn't a little plane.  It was a passenger jet."

I didn't know what to say.  She didn't either.  She told me goodbye; she was going to call her husband.  I don't remember if I called mine; if I did, he wasn't at his desk.  I hung up the phone and turned on the radio.

It was a difficult day.  I had to limit myself to only a few minutes of radio at a time.  The boys are too little to deal with this, I thought.  They don't need to hear it all day, even if I do.  I remember praying a lot, praying for the victims, for their families, for the rescue workers.  I tried to smile and have a normal family day with the boys.  We watched a video, read books, played with blocks and cars together.  I heard about a plane striking the Pentagon.  I worried what would be next.  I think I was listening to the radio when the first tower fell.  I think I was listening when the second fell.  I heard there was a crash in Pennsylvania.

I was alone in a fragile bubble, waiting for the next horror to drop from the sky and smash into our little house, probably to take my precious sons and leave me entirely broken.  I read with the children and my voice seemed to echo inside my head, while other sounds seemed distant and muffled.  I kept going to the front window and looking out into the empty cul-de-sac, wondering if my neighbors were watching what was happening.

I didn't know what it all meant.  Someone had done this, planned this, carried it out.  Someone hated the America I love, so much that they hated "generic" Americans enough to blindly kill them.  They hated me.  Not me specifically, but if they were told they could push a button and kill a mother of two in Indiana, they would do it.  I'd known there were terrorists in the world, but I'd never known the terror of being one of the little metal targets in the carnival shooting booth.  The wheel turns and here comes that mother duck followed by one, two little ducklings.  Sh-ping!  Sh-ping!  If I quack, will my ducklings answer back?  I'm afraid to find out.

I remember as a child hearing that my grandfather had died.  I remember feeling guilty for getting hungry and thirsty, even for using the bathroom, when he never would again.  I told myself it was silly to feel guilty, but it is an emotion that still comes back with other losses.  I felt guilty that night for going to bed, knowing there were people buried in the rubble -- maybe some of them alive! -- and I wasn't doing anything to help them.  I felt guilty for kissing my husband when he came home that day, and the next, and the next...

I didn't feel guilty for being an American, by the way, and for loving my country.  For that, I have never felt guilty, or ashamed.

I just felt guilty for going on living my everyday life when for so many... it was over.  People who had lives as simply American as mine were dead, simply because they lived their American lives in a different place than I did.



I just took a long, deep breath.  And another.  And another.  It has been eleven years.  My boys don't remember that day at all, and in my more rational moments that makes sense...  But memory isn't totally rational, and I keep thinking that they will grow into the memory, like somehow aging now makes them older when it happened, or like the American collective will teach them to remember events they did not experience.

Several of my friends blogged about their 9/11 memories today, and I thought I'd come back here to my neglected blog and read what I've said about it before.  Imagine my surprise to discover I'd written nothing about it here.

Well, now I have.