Reflections of 9/11

I am currently writing a fiction novel related to the event, so these are my ramblings of where I was on that day. I've done some editing, so hopefully, it reads better.

Two days before 9/11, on a sunny Sunday morning, my friend called me and we began making preliminary plans for a winter vacation to New York. February, we decided, would be a good time time to go. The thought of a harsh winter hadn't crossed our minds. Instead, we only thought of...

"The Italian men," she beamed on the phone. "And I hear they like black women."

"Nice," I said, or something like it. "We'll get to see New York. Maybe we'll get to see the World Trade Center!" 

My fascination in the 16-acre complex had been present ever since the bombing of 1993. I had seen them before in movies, and I understood in 1993 they represented everything that certain terrorist groups hated about America. Naturally, I wrote about them in a story and a poem, as most writers do. My friend, unaware of my interest in the Twin Towers, responded to my excitement with a stilted, "O-Okay." She probably thought I was nut.

I quickly covered up my last comment with another pertaining to the sexiness of dating New York Italian men. 

Two days later, I climbed vigorously on the stairclimber, a quick work out before work, until I stopped the machine and I noticed how eerily quiet everything had become. People stared up, with all eyes glued to the television. I looked up to see the Twin Towers on fire. 

"What happened?"

"Planes crashed into the World Trade Center."

What is up with these buildings that people want to do them in? I thought to myself. It crossed my mind it that this was another terrorist attack. However, I also thought it had been small planes, or even worse, the Rapture. After all, Christians in my church joked about the Rapture happening and planes falling out of the sky. Even one of the newscasters, his voice carrying over the wretch scene of sunny skies and billowing smoke across the New York City skyline, spoke of people thinking it was the Rapture. What? I thought with rising alarm. I headed for the showers, fear mounting in me at the possibility  that it was the Rapture and the world was ending, or that it may have been terrorists -- or both. I showered with uncertainty and increasing apprehension of what was taking place. I had to get to work, as I worked for a newspaper and I knew this was going to be news. I'd definitely find out more there. When I came out of the shower, a woman grabbed me and pulled me toward the television screen hanging over the lockers. 

"One of the towers just collapsed!" she cried. 

"What?" I responded in disbelief. "Are you sure?" Wait a minute, they were on fire a few minutes ago, but now one of the buildings had collapsed, all 110 stories? I thought.

Thus came the first defining moment; it became unreal -- almost like I'd walked into a movie. I heard it, and I responded, but it wasn't me -- I was on autopilot, numbed, my inner self had disassociated. 

 No, this wasn't happening. 

We watched the news unfold. New York City sat engulfed in smoke. The newscaster's voice cracked -- he struggled to keep himself from breaking down -- as he announced, "The Pentagon's been attacked, someone's attacked the Pentagon." Emergency blotter messages rambled across the screen, announcing news of the president declaring an emergency and grounding every plane in the nation. 

We were under attack. 

Second defining moment -- every reason for those emergency school drills I endured as a pupil became real to me in that moment. We were under attack. Just as England had endured blitzkrieg bombings from Germany during World War II, we were under attack. Just as teachers told us to crouch down in fetal position at the front of the classroom This was it. That realization sent a wave of panic through me, along with anxious thought; it's terrorists. Faceless terrorists have done this, "they" have done this, it's the Rapture. It's - 

And then we saw watched as the second World Trade Center tower collapsed -- live. I knew at that moment, I watched people die on live television as this 110 - story building collapsed in on itself like a deck of cards. There must've been thousands of people in there. 

"Oh my God" I muttered, in shock, standing only in a towel. 

I don't remember how long we stood there, but I remember getting dressed and leaving the gym stunned, and frightened. By now I heard there were other planes unaccounted for. The world's end had come, had it? Would other attacks come? What if attacks were lunched on other states, even here in California?

I called my parents and told them what was going on. I drove to work on a scarcely-populated freeway, underneath a cloudless, sunny sky, even as all Hell broke loose and the world came to an end. Rick Dees of KIIS FM radio spoke of planes that were still considered missing and fourth plane that had gone down in Pennsylvania. I knew it was terrorist, but I had to make sure -- had we entered the Tribulation? I couldn't believe that the World Trade Center, its two twin 110-story buildings were gone! Surely this wasn't happening, was it? Surely we weren't under attack, were we? 

When I arrived at the newsroom, I put my stuff down and B-lined to the copy editing room where Sherry, a secretary, and two other workers sat talking.

"Is anybody here a Christian?" I asked anxiously.

"Yes," Sherry said, although I already knew that she was. 

"Good!" I exclaimed. "The Rapture didn't happen!"

But terrorists had still attacked us.

I don't remember what they did. Maybe they laughed nervously, but they knew why I'd said it. We all knew. We began talking about what was happening, and I must have sounded  panicked because my editor walked in immediately with urgent words of, "Calm down! Everyone calm down, we'll figure out what to do."

OK, he didn't have the magic key to end the chaos. He simply meant what stories we'd cover. We couldn't do anything to help those in New York or Washington. As a reporter I knew this story was big -- huge. I waited at the desk, waited to see what he'd have me cover. A story of someone here in Palmdale who knew someone in New York? A vigil held by Palmdale citizens to honor the fallen? Opinions by the public of what was transpiring. I tried to think of other people to call: Alex, my friend with "benefits?" no, not him. My friend Chyenne? I called her and told her to turn on the news.

"The World Trade Center collapsed!" I informed her. 

"Oh," she responded nonchalantly. (Seriously, I felt like screaming through the phone. That's all you can say, "Oh?")

"And the Pentagon's been attacked!" I added.

"What?" that got her attention quick. She watched and said, "Oh my goodness, they're saying thousand of people may have died."

My editor came in with the news assignments he wanted me to cover for the day: I was to be the floating reporter, you know, the one who isn't working on the biggest news of the century, but the garden-variety, unappealing news that we would have covered on any given day. Really? I sat there, stunned at the thought that I wasn't even going to cover this, and I'm sure he saw my appalled face. Still, I nodded and said, "OK." 

It was hard to cover normal news. Even when I made my calls and went out to talk to people, the attacks hung over my head, as it did for those I interviewed -- we all ended up talking about it anyway. And as it turned out, I wasn't a "floating reporter" for long. I was assigned a story with a 9/11 angle -- a teddy bear drive held by a local school where children collected bears for the children who lost their New York Police Department dads in the attacks. Later, I'd cover an article about people's reaction to the attacks, and I'd retrieve opinions from Palmdale's Middle Eastern community.  "I heard five hundred Middle Easterners died in the World Trade Center,"  a ten-year-old boy told me. (The actual number is around 60 or so). 

Returning to that day, we couldn't pull ourselves from the television as CNN and other news networks replayed the morning's events. I saw these were not dinky little planes, but jetliners that had plummeted into the buildings, and when the towers had collapsed, it resembled something out of the movie Dante's Peak, with a sinister-looking, black, debris cloud swallowing up people as they ran from the collapse. I'm sure I heard some cussing and gasps from reporters and copywriters in the newsroom -- we were all in shock. Even as we all filed our stories by deadline, we still gathered around the computer to search the Internet for more information on the event. By the time I got home it was 8 p.m.

"We've been here all day," my mom stressed as I walked in the door. She bore a nightgown to prove it. 

I don't remember what I said or whom I talked to when I logged on the chatrooms -- which buzzed with the horrors of that day's events. I just remember that I woke up the next day with knot in my stomach and a weight on my shoulder. The world had changed. 

My editor, a former Marine, was a World War II history buff. He likened Sept. 11 to Dec. 7, 1941, the day Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and hurtled the U.S into World War II. I remember that President Roosevelt, when announcing the attack by radio, had announced, "This is a day we shall live in infamy." So for our newspaper, our Sept. 12, 2001 headline read one simple word -- INFAMY -- splashed across the full page photo of the World Trade Center on fire

. During those four days the president grounded all airplanes, the sky screamed silence. One of my other editors, who had been returning from Germany, founded her stranded in Hawaii, of all place. By the time the ban lifted, my parents were on a plane to Minnesota so that my stepdad could attend his sister's wake. I did my normal thing -- going out to a club and hanging out with acquaintances --- but it was all mechanical. 

All of it. IT was for all of us. We operated like robots, still in shock and stunned by what happened. A friend of mine, who came over on Saturday, couldn't believe how men would just ram planes into the buildings like that. By then we had learned of the culprits, how they took over with box cutters and gain control of the flights. We heard of how authorities suspected the fourth plane may have been brought down when passengers overwhelmed the terrorists and kept them from slamming the plane into another intended target. 

"I mean, they just ran them into the buildings like wow,' Jeff told me. "They didn't even flinch." 

No, they didn't. 

News of the disaster inundated us everyday, and we couldn't keep ourselves away from it. Everyday I awoke with that heavy-weight, stomach knot thing, knowing, constantly knowing that something was different -- the world was different. No words could describe what I thought of everything -- I could only drop my jaw in shock. 

I remember a few days after the attacks, as I came to work, Moby's "Lordy, Troubles So High" popped on the radio. As the bars droned through my ears, the significance of the song, and reality of what was happening, hit me. 

"Don't nobody knows my troubles but God...." the song sang, and in that moment, it was like the song was meant for that time, for that period -- a perfect, poetic way to describe the uncertainty transpiring as the world seemed to be coming to an end. 

Understand that I knew no one there -- I hadn't been to New York at the time, but it was like I had been traumatized -- I think that could be said for everyone. We walked through our days like drones, people on autopilot, trying to make sense what happened. Even as normal television programming returned to normal and Sept. 11 stopped dominating the front page, it still sat in the back of our minds. 

Three weeks after 9/11, my father came back into my life. 

I hadn't seen the man in 18 or so years. Seriously. I was maybe seven or eight, living in Denver, when I last saw him. Since then I had lived in California, where my stepdad became my father. My mother told me of how Dad cheated on her, how he left her, or maybe they just divorced, and that he owed her child support. He had basically been out of our lives all those years, and I got the impression he had left us cold-heartedly. In a way, I was true. The last time I actually talked to him was 1985, at age 10, when he told me he would come visit me the following year. He never did. I had learned that he didn't care for me. Fortunately Jim, my stepfather, fulfilled the role. 

But now my read father came back. My mom told me my sister found out how to contact him in northern California. And then two days later he was calling me. I don't know why.  Why hadn't he bother to call us before? Maybe Sept. 11 had something to do with it - -after all the tragedy spurred people into coming to synagogues and churches, rethinking the meaning of life. I myself felt it had been a threshold into the LAST days.  But yes, my father wanted to see my sister and I. He took us to Claim Jumpers, but I felt nothing, absolutely nothing for him. 

I didn't even feel angry toward him. I just felt numb and removed from the situation, much like the day the towers went down. 

A couple of weeks later, in October, we found ourselves in the throws of the anthrax scare. That was also around the time I ended up in a car accident with my friend. I was in the passenger seat. she was driving. We t-boned a car that ran a read light. The accident left us bruised and the car totaled. The other guy ended up going to the hospital. It was like, in those three to four months, life became unraveled, starting with 9/11. 

I left the newspaper at the end of 2001  to pursue a master's degree in northern California. The first part of 2002 was the unhappiest. I was truly unhappy. By the summer, my sister would get remarried, and I would rededicate my life to the Lord Jesus. 

Did 9/11 play a role in these events? Maybe, maybe not, but I find it coincidences interesting, and wrote about these experiences in The Healing Process, a story revolving around four characters impacted by 9/11 and the process of healing they endure in the months to come. 

I remember, sometime in 1998 or 1999, watching an HBO movie about the World Trade Center bombing. The movie dramatized the terrorist's plot, the actual bombing (which killed six and injured 1,000), and the FBI's search and capture of the culprits. It turned out that the terrorist hoped the bomb would cause one of the towers to collapse into the other, bringing them both down. At the end of the movie, the film depicts the FBI whisking the terrorist away by helicopter as it flies over the Twin Towers. The terrorist remarks, "We will bring them down." That scene came back to my mind with chills.

They sure did. 

Author's Note

jus some ramblings. Sorry for the typos