Remembering

[msmemory_archive]

My parents' generation had Kennedy's assassination as a defining moment. "Where were you?" was a common question, to tie folks together in sharing how they learned of it. (I remember I was very small indeed, and the milkman brought some news to Mother that upset her terribly; she dropped to the chair in the kitchen and hid her face in her apron. Only later did I figure out from the timing what it must have been.)

Where was I three years ago?

I was driving to work, had just decided to cut across Smith St. to go around a knot of traffic at Trapelo and 128.

The announcer came on the radio, and said that someone had just flown a plane into the World Trade Center. "What a nut!" I thought, figuring it was somebody in a private two-seater who thought he would give his girl a fright and miscalculated. Then I found out the truth.

When I got to work, we did nothing all morning but try to catch news. Radio, of course, since the Internet was congested to the point of unusable. Then someone remembered there was a little b&w television in the lab, used by the machinists to illicitly track the ballgames. That got moved into the kitchen, where at least most of us could keep checking in.

I remember talking with KG. He was being horrified by the jumpers. My view was, I didn't know whether I could choose between staying and burning to death, or jumping. At least if one jumped, there was a chance of being unconscious at the time of death. At the time, it didn't occur to us that the towers would come down, annulling the choice.

After work, I did the only thing I could: I hung out our flag. Wasn't eligible to give blood (previous donation was too recent). Prayed, of course, and cried. Watched the news coverage over and over, as if I could numb myself. Thought perhaps we'd get good news eventually, as we did when some of the trapped were found in the Murrah building. Cried some more.

Comments

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

I keep telling my students they will always remember, and that their kids with ask them, probably as part of an assignment from me.

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

I was at work, I lost that job a week later. I remember being in New York for Rosh Hashana the following week and it was just surreal. There were posters all over the city saying "Missing, worked on the 85th floor of North Tower" and the Like with pictures, and you knew they were dead.

Actually what really solidifed the day was when I called the Hanscom field terminal info line and hear it confirmed that the FAA had ordered a national ground stop on all aviation.

To be honest the terorism that sticks in my mind is the 3 attack I have been "close" to, Caffe Hillel, the #19 and the #14 bus.

[silme.livejournal.com]

Teaching in England at an international school (also a boarding school) in Surrey. School had just ended and the yearbook kids were in my room, fighting over a theme. My then fiance, now my husband, my reason for moving to the UK, sent me a text message telling me a plane had hit the WTC and to go online to CNN. Whilst the kids fought, another student and I went online (I had about six computers in the classroom, all hooked up to the Internet). We couldn't get into CNN, but we saw the photo... We thought it was a joke until another teacher told me she had Channel 4 on in her room next door (I didn't have a TV in my room, she did), so we all went over there... I gave out a lot of tissues; I remember running back to my classroom for the box of tissues.

It was a boarding school, and I was on duty that night till 10.30 PM. My job that evening was to go to the girls' dorms and make sure the students on independent study in their rooms were doing that. That night, no one was studying, of course. I was a counselor, going from room to room. Half the boarders were American -- some were the children of rich kids whose parents sent them abroad. Others were the children of parents whose international corporations sent them all over the world, and the companies were footing the bill. The rest were from everywhere from Sweden to Brazil to China. And they were all upset. A girl from Nigeria knew that her parents had an appoinment in the WTC that morning. But because of the problems with the phone lines, she wasn't able to reach them -- nor could they reach her -- for two days. She actually was studying that night, trying to take her mind off of it all.

I was too young when JFK died to understand it all. My siblings were in junior high and high school, and they did. When RFK died, I got it. My sister and I went to see the funeral train as it went through Philadelphia. I've been with students watching Challenger explode on TV, watching Columbine, then watching what happened three years ago.

Btw, 11 September is my husband's birthday.

[kfitzwarin.livejournal.com]

For me, it happened in the early afternoon.

I was having a weird day already. We'd gotten up ungodly early to be at Hammersmith for some temp work. I met Robert & Signy there, it turned out we didn't have work (there'd been a scheduling snafu) so we had a breakfast, then Robert & I went to his place and Signy went home. We had another breakfast, hung out, and had just finished lunch when Signy rang on the mobile telling us to turn on the television - we did in time to see the second plane hit.

We made some phone calls (couldn't get through mostly), then watched all afternoon. Eventually went to fighting practice. I spent the whole next day at PS's watching the news (we didn't have TV or license at our house).

Interestingly, that afternoon PS got sacked from his job, so the mood was very weird indeed....

That day, and in the days that followed, it was interesting to be an American living in Britain - the mood was very different than it had been (which had been mostly anti-Bush sentiments prior to that). A country that has suffered domestic terrorism for years takes these things a bit more in stride than the US did, and of course we were getting UK news reports. Recently I went back and listened to the NPR reports from that first day or so (they're online), and tried to recall the UK reports and analyse the difference.

[cellio]

I was at work. A friend sent me an instant message saying someone had flown a plane into the building, and I too thought it was some little private plane. I sent my web browser in search of news, and a couple minutes later he sent me another message saying "TWO planes" and I said "that's not an accident". By then some of my coworkers were getting calls, and my browser had timed out on CNN, and we started wandering the halls to see what each other knew. Half an hour later someone had scored a TV; I saw the towers fall on live TV.

We didn't get much work done that day, and around 2:30 or 3 I said "screw it" and just went home.

Where was I...

[cristovau.livejournal.com]

I was at my parent's house. I'd just returned to America after three years abroad. I was working on a rough draft for a scifi novel when my sister called and then all the TVs went on. It immediately hit me that for all the destruction we saw, our retaliation would be ten times more violent. The comment that kept running through my head was "What have they unleashed?"

I went back to my writing, all hollow inside, and realised with a sickening thud that my villian was a cardboard cut-out terrorist. I never finished it.