My 9/11 Memory

Why not?  Everyone else, and every television station show, thought, commercial...they're all talking about it.  I don't much talk about this because 1) everyone has their own story and 2) GPOM is a conspiracy theorist and I'm guessing hides his emotions more than he'll let me know.

It was a sunny Tuesday morning and for the first time in weeks, I was in no mood to listen to NPR, which I normally did.  I wanted music.  So I tossed a CD in Circe (m car - still is!) and car-danced all the way to Geeks-R-Us, which employed a large number of foreign nationals.

When I got to work, the receptionist said something about having heard weird news, and did I hear?  No.  Something about planes hitting a building in New York City?  No.  I went to my office and tried to pull up any news on the internet.  The data stream was completely clogged and I couldn't get anything but a strange picture on the Yahoo front page.

A bit later, others came to work and starting telling me about what was happening, and then an email circulated stating that we could go home if we were concerned.  I went to my boss and explained that one of my closest friends lived in the city and that my brother was (is) a pilot for United.  I was excused.

At home, I turned on the TV and started to see the real destruction.  I probably got home around 8:30am, and my desire to call everyone kicked in.  I don't remember a lot other than pure terror.  How?  Why?  WTF is wrong with Paula Zahn?  Even in the chaos, I knew that asking someone how it felt to know a family member just died was about the worst fucking thing to be asked in the midst of all of this.

I remember talking with Lucy's mother, and we were worried about a mutual friend and her husband.  They lived in Astoria, Queens, and I didn't know where that was in relation to Manhattan.  Finally we got our friend's mother on the phone and they were both fine, shaken, newsless, but fine.

My brother turned out to be just fine as well - he was across the country at the time.  But when I finally spoke to him, he told me that he was the pilot for United Flight 93 on September 10, 2001.

Guilt mixed with unbelievable gratitude that exists to this day.  I still don't know how to put that into words.