September 11th

Its been 7 years. I thought of that today as I drove around trying to get madeline to nap- I thought how she wasn't even a thought in my mind 7 years ago. Greg and I weren't even talking. In 7 years we got together, engaged, married and now we have a 2 and a half year old who will one day ask me where I was on September 11th, 2001.

And I will start my story the way almost everyone does- it was the most gorgeous day , not a cloud in the sky. High 70s , low 80s, maybe . You have to mention how perfect the day was because of the horrific events that took place- its like Mother Nature's own oxymoron. The details of that day- how I got a phone call saying a plane had crashed into the tower, how i didn't have a TV yet b/c i had just moved into my apartment two days before, how I thought for sure this was an accident, how even after the second plane hit, there was still a part of me for one nano second that thought" oh, something must be wrong with traffic controllers computer systems today" ...and then the dread as my mind computed what this all meant ...and as I thought of all who had died- the deatils are all fresh in my mind. Never in my wildest dreams did I think the towers would collapse. Maybe they'd lose some floors and have to rebuild, or worse even shut it down while they rebuilt- but not for one second did I think what happened would happen.

I got in my car and drove to my parents house. I didn't want to be alone, I needed to be with people. As I was driving the news came the tower collapsed, people were jumping, the Pentagon was hit. By the time I got to my moms I saw the second tower fall and I , along with the rest of the world was in complete shock. I went to work in a daze, looking up at the sky that had no planes, and roads that were only filled with firetrucks and EMS trucks rushing west.

Because I didn't have a TV to see the actual live events, I became obsessed with watching it. For years afterwards, I would watch anything and everything having to do with 9/11, read anything that gave firsthand accounts. I wanted in my heart to believe that the way NY came together after the towers feel, they way everyone was looking out for everyone else when Penn Station was plastered with missing flyers- I wanted that to last. I knew it wouldn't, and soon we'd go back to complaining about stupid stuff, taking friends and family for granted and letting little things bother us.

Seven years later, I feel like we've really lost it. There is very little mention of 9/11 in the news( well, what I watch of it anyway. Certainly they're not talking about it on Noggin), and I imagine next year will be less. Then they'll do big things on the big anniversaries- 10, 20, and eventually 50 years. Those who weren't here when it happened will learn about it through history books. But books will never capture the feeling of New York City in the weeks afterwards. I had tickets to a play two weeks afterwards. Honestly, I didn't want to go. The atomosphere was too unstable and scary, but I was meeting a friend, and I had to go. I couldn't go down to Ground Zero, I didn't want to . Here it was a Saturday night in NYC and it was a ghost town.


So these are the things I will tell Madeline when she asks. Greg has his own story to tell- and since he was down there for weeks and months afterwards, it differs greatly from mine and he's never actually told me the whole story.
But I will never forget. September 11th will never just be another day to me, like Dec 7th is to people who weren't around for WWII. We know something happened that day equally as horrific, but we didn't live it. Unfortunately, we lived September 11th.