Nine Eleven

What can one say? The picture really does give pause.

I managed to avoid most of the weekend overcoverage of Sept 11, but so far today I haven’t minded what I’ve heard on NPR. I feel both grief and anger at the direction our country has taken since 2001. We all lost our innocence, but not enough people lost their arrogance that day.

As the wife of a fire captain, it was my duty today to go to a memorial to the fallen public safety personnel and innocent victims of New York and D.C. this day (which also happens to also be our wedding anniversary) here in Vancouver (Washington, not B.C).

It was touching (a local police officer with a wonderful voice singing the National Anthem, a friend playing bagpipes, seeing all the faces of Vancouver’s finest and bravest) and infuriating (constant conflation of 9/11 and the current fiasco in Iraq).

My favorite part was in the closing prayer by a local pastor, who first asked God to bless this country, which our forefathers set up to be just like he liked it, and then invoked Him to flush out the enemy for us so that we might kill them as He intended.

So evildoers, you are on notice.

Vancouver “hearts” NY and DC, and our thoughts (both the righties and the lefties) are with you.

Tess, unfortunately I can commisserate.

One of my favorite words that now has lost significant meaning to me because of repetition and overly excessive “excuse” use is “resolve.”

I hope that someday everyday folks will be able to use that particular word again in unity, without conjuring up the cringe-inducing arrogance imagery.

Jim (O…J) - Well, you can still use resolve to clean carpets with minimal arrogance imagery.

Don’t hold back, Francoise, tell us how you really feel.

I lived, and still do, within 60 or 70 miles of the WTC site, and visited NYC often, but I seldom ventured south of Greenwich Village, and would not have gone to the top of the towers even if I’d thought of it. The Empire State Building is quite tall enough for me, thank you very much.

Still, it was a shocking sight to fly past Manhattan just a month or two later, on a night flight heading back into LaGuardia, and see that big empty space.

The morning before the attacks, I’d taken a dawn flight home from Michigan, where my mother was in her last weeks of a cancer battle; I’d been doing regular long-weekend visits that summer, and most often went Friday night through Tuesday morning. Good time to have changed the routine.

The national catharsis that followed (I was introduced to so many good poets on Fresh Air that month) helped prepare me for the impending personal tragedy. That sense of pulling together as a nation gave great comfort. An evening at the Herbst Theater with Garrison Keillor two weeks later was a salve for many of us - the voices raised in gentle song at the end of the evening linger with me still. I came home that night to hear that my mom had days left, if that. One upside of the bigger events was that last minute flights were easy to come by.

The two events are understandably intertwined for me. Because it’s a “bigger” anniversary, this year’s commemorations have dredged up deeper feelings. I’d rather think of my mom alive, rather than recall her time of dying; the closeness of the dates means that it will never be possible to put those weeks away entirely. On the other hand, it means that I will always be able to genuinely summon up the feeling of unity that came after the attacks, because it’s filed with the true and personal memories, and can’t be touched by political manipulation in that place.

(Fanny held a less serious comment of mine last night - if she releases it this morning, the juxtaposition may be odd.)

I work in a DVD Authoring facility and we have monitors everywhere, some with built-in TV tuners. The morning of the attacks we made a makeshift antenna out of some speaker wire (which had been holding a broken chair together up to that point) and gathered around to watch the events 100 miles to our East unfold on TV. After a while I couldn’t watch anymore - after I realized that those black specks dropping along the sides were not birds caught in sudden downdrafts - and walked into our lobby to stare out a window. Sometime later someone came to me and said “One of the towers just fell over.” I called on my Physics training, ran the vectors in my head, looked her in the eyes and said “That isn’t possible.” And it wasn’t. It fell down, straight down, like a column of water that had ben shut off.

I’m going to write something heretical. I never liked the twin towers. They were too big for their space, dominating everything around them. Whenever I saw them, words like ‘arrogant’ & ‘haughty’ & ‘pompous’ would come to mind. Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not arguing that there was any justification for flying airplanes into those towers. But I must say that the terrorists chose wisely if what they wanted was to strike at a symbol for American hubris.

I agree, David–it does help. And thank you, Siobhan–reading your remembrance smoothed my hackles a bit.

SeattleDan commented about the lone airplane in the sky. We live in a fairly busy flyover area, too. Depending on the atmospheric conditions, there are usually multiple contrails in the sky. Military, commercial, civil–it’s all up there and if you can’t see it, you can hear it. (It’s 11pm as I type this and there’s a small aircraft flying in circles over town.)

The day after the attack my husband and I went for a long walk that culminated on the top of rise. It was a clear day and so quiet. We were outside of town. The only engine sound we heard was the occasional car in the distance. Looking up and all around, the only things flying were birds, and bugs. It was beautiful, and weird, and one of the few immediate reminders in our area–over 2000 miles from New York–of what had happened.

Francoise -

I’d be interested to see that documentary (and it would be the first and only documentary of 9/11 that I would watch)

In 2001, I worked in Flight Operations for N- Airlines, and that was a huge scramble mission. We were frantically trying to make contact with every single airplane, on the ground or in the air, to figure out a.) were any of our planes involved, and b.) could we keep everyone safe. c.) how to get everyone onto the ground asap. International flight were turned around or diverted, depending on location and fuel supplies. All of this was done in a haze of unreality, with one eye on the tv monitors, hoping against hope that it was some sort of sick, twisted farce (al la War of the Worlds) The hours and days that followed, as we figured out where our planes and crew ended up, and then kept trying to figure out how to “restart” the airline when the FAA finally gave the word (we had numerous false timetables, and each time we’d have to scrap everything and start over) My husband had orders to be on the first plane leaving for DC, and that simply added to the stress.

Every time I look at Adam’s picture, I have the same thought. The sky is so blue. It was that day, too. I never think of New York with a bright blue sky. Every time I’ve been there, it has either been grey and cloudy or hazy pollution. The bright blue sky was almost an obscenity that day, mocking the death and destruction and hatred and violence.

I wish that we could stop reliving those hours over and over ad nauseum. I don’t think that there is a person who witnessed that day that will ever forget the images…. I feel as if they were burned into my brain and my soul. What I would like to do is let it become part of our past, mourned, remembered, but finally allowed to rest in peace, undisturbed; the way it should be.

katie