9/11

 

9/11/2001

 Today I decided to write not about my ancestor's stories but about my memory of 9/11. One way to never forget is for us to write down our memories.  I wasn't there but it is a historical event that I will never forget. My grandchildren were just babies and do not have their own memories of that day.  But everyone who was old enough to have memories of it, remember exactly where they were and how they heard about it.

 As I drove to work that morning, I wasn't paying much attention to the radio until I heard that a plane had crashed into a building.  I didn't hear where or exactly when though I learned minutes later that the first plane had just hit the twin towers.  Before we could pull out the large program TV at work, the second airplane had hit. For awhile we had the TV pulled out into the public area of the library, but as the day went on we realized that parents were bringing their children to the library to get them away from their TVs at home.  We pulled the TV back into a work area and left it there for the next couple of days, turning it on and off depending on our state of mind.

 When we heard that a plane had hit the Pentagon, I realized that two of my nieces and a nephew's father worked at the Pentagon.  I called my sister to find out if she had heard from her children and if she had any news about her ex-husband.  It took most of the day for her to find out that he was on the opposite side of the Pentagon and was okay.

 My supervisor had family in New York.  Her uncle worked on Manhattan Island near the Twin Towers. It took him almost 24 hours to make the normally one hour trip to get home.  The ferries were full and he had to walk across a bridge where he eventually found a ferry to take him home. Her aunt could not reach him by phone as the phone service was in chaos. However, eventually she was able to talk to both her uncle and aunt. They could both talk to her in Dallas but could not talk to each other.  She relayed messages between them the entire time he was trying to get home. She was also able to keep other family members updated on how the family in New York was doing.

 It seemed that we were all in shock for days wondering if something else was going to happen and in disbelief that such an horrendous act had happened in America.  It seemed that despite the Oklahoma bombing by an American only 6 years earlier, we only then really understood what it meant to know terrorism could happen here.