9/11 Memories

For the past nineteen years, around the end of August or the beginning of September, I’d get the feeling that I should write a blog about what I did on 9/11.  I think I even started writing one in 2002, but it quickly became weird.  I didn’t know anyone who died that day, I wasn’t anywhere near any of the places attacked; I was just some schmuck who watched it all on TV.  It felt like by writing about my experiences, I was trying to shoehorn my way in to a tragedy I was only a distant spectator of.  Since then, every time I thought about writing a blog about it I’d stop myself because my experiences are only the … 61,567,928th most important of that day.  And that’s an overestimation. 

So why does this blog exist?  Well, 9/11 was a tragic day that changed countless lives, but it’s not something I think about every day.  Time dulls all tragedies.  If I say Pearl Harbor, you – hopefully – know the significance of that event, but it may have been months since the last time you thought of it.  As the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 was coming up, I started thinking more and more of the day, and I realized that my memories had become fuzzy.  As the years pass, my memories will only become fuzzier, so this is more for me to have a clearer record for me to read in ten or twenty years.

A few months before 9/11, I moved to Kennett Square, PA.  It was the other side of the state from where I grew up – and where I live now – but I had gone to college in the area and some of my friends were near there.  My hope was to find a better job than I could find in the middle of nowhere.  I was living off my savings, but my plan for that Tuesday was to go around to see what places were hiring and get some applications to fill out.

For any youngsters reading this, 2001 was before … basically everything you think of as “The Internet.” I had an old laptop for writing, but to check my email, I had to go to the library.  My main source of news was a TV channel called Headline News, which went over the latest headlines every half-hour.  I’d usually watch a bit before I’d go to bed to see the latest national and international news.  And I’d usually watch it while I ate breakfast in case anything happened while I was asleep.

That morning, I turned the news on and went to go to my kitchen.  I saw something about the Twin Towers on fire, and at first I thought it had something to do with the 1993 bombing.  Then I saw “Live” on the screen, and I wondered if someone had bombed it again.  Here’s the first fuzzy part.  I can’t remember what I was doing when the second plane hit.  I’m almost positive that I just missed it, but I can’t remember if I was just flipping through the channels, or if I had just stepped back to the kitchen for something. 

Once it became certain that this wasn’t just a plane crash, I was glued to the TV.  My TV at the time was old, and the remote didn’t have numbers on it.  If I wanted to go from Channel 40 to Channel 20, I had to go through the intervening channels.  I’d watch one news channel for five or ten minutes, then switch to another.  And one of the details of that day burned into my brain, is that I left one channel, and when I arrived at the next one three or four seconds later, the first tower was collapsing.  It started to collapse just as I switched channels.  I left the report of the disaster on one channel, and when I arrived at the next news channel and it was like finding out about this whole new disaster, in progress.

Sometime that afternoon, it was reported that President Bush had been flown to some Air Force base.  At the time, I was a member of the Air Force Association.  (I’ve never served in the military, I was just an interested party.) One of the things the AFA does is publish a yearly almanac of everything Air Force: personnel numbers, types of planes, base locations, etc.  So I grabbed my most recent copy, and looked up that Air Force base.  Besides all the information on who was based there and what planes they had, there was the mundane stuff like the address as well as the phone and probably fax numbers.  It was the strangest feeling to know that – during an attack on the country – I could have called the place the President had been, an hour ago. 

Probably just a couple of weeks before, I found out about a poetry group that met each month at a local bookstore.  Their scheduled meeting was that evening, and I had planned to check them out.  I went, in large part, just hoping to be with other people.  But of course the meeting was canceled, so I just wandered around the bookstore for a bit before going back home.  Where I watched the news until 2 or 3 the next morning before finally going to bed.

As I said, I was just a schmuck who watched it on TV.  For what it’s worth, I now have only a slightly fuzzy record of that day.