On September 11, 2001 as I was driving into work, the top story of the day - in St. Louis at least - at the top of my commute was that there had been a series of unsolved cat mutilations in the area.
Slow news day, I thought.
I was listening, as I did just about every morning then, to the Bob and Sheri morning show on the FM talk station here, 97.1. This was when the station was fairly new and was trying to figure itself out. (Now it is 99.9% a conservative talk station and Bob and Sheri are long gone.) I think the topic of discussion was in laws, in laws living with you, or strange people living with you, or something like that. I think some woman was talking about a humorous situation where her brother in law was living in her basement or something when Bob interrupted her to say that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. Surely, he says, it must've bee a Cessna or something similar. Crack reporting, Bob. He thought it was quite odd. He and Sheri remarked at how beautiful of a day it was in New York City, how could a plane have gotten so off with no inclement weather?
So they go back to the woman and her story.
Back before 97.1 had decided it was largely a mouthpiece for conservative talking heads, their news breaks were from CNN and not Fox News. They interrupted their show again to broadcast a CNN snippet. The man being interviewed, or giving a speech (I have no idea as to who it was, maybe somebody from the FAA.) He also said that he didn't see how it could have been an accident, as the skies were clear in New York. My memory is fuzzy on this, but I think that still, at that point, they were thinking it was a small plane. Or maybe not.
I do know this: By that time, nobody was talking about the cats anymore.
When I got to work I told my boss and our network guy, a former Marine (well, according to him, there are no former Marines, just non-active ones) that a plane had hit the WTC. At that point I hadn't given much thought as to the cause of it; maybe it was an accident. Humans have certainly done things just have bone-headed in our history. They had no idea. Immediately my boss jumped on CNN.com on this old computer in the front room hooked to a gigantic monitor that used to be a big screen television. There was the photo of the burning building, front page.
When my coworker Doug arrived I asked him "Hey didja hear about the plane?" He responded "Plane? Try planes, plural!" The other three of us immediately tried to get back on CNN.com on our own computers. No dice. CNN.com was too busy. This is where things started to get freaky.
"Another one's hit the Pentagon!" somebody yelled.
After some clicking on his computer, Doug said "They're saying as many as three more planes could be hijacked, too!"
Oh and by the way it was salesman Rob's birthday that day. "Your birthday is today?? Well, uh... happy birthday?"
It was a weird day to be working on websites. My boss had a little television on and a radio on. The "non-active" Marine at one point announced: "One of 'em's collapsed and the other one's leanin!" "How many people were still in there?!" I said as we watched the second one fall. I called my wife, mother, grandmother... Suffice to say, it was hard to focus on HTML and Photoshop work. But somehow we did get stuff done.
When the FAA grounded all air traffic my wife was on her way to work. She works at UMSL in the biology labs. She was driving by Lambert Airport (UMSL is right by there) and said it was one of the freakiest thing she'd ever seen. Planes, planes, and more planes, all circling, all landing and trying to land.
In the days afterward it was eerily silent in the area. No jet planes roaring overhead. We drove by, or were right by the airport almost every day (I used to go to UMSL and, with my wife working there, still drop by there frequently.) Somebody who is by an airport a lot, you notice it a lot more when there are no more planes. You don't notice how much noise they make, how much you hear them on a regular basis, until they're gone. It felt end-of-the-worldish.
"Give blood, give blood, give blood!" everybody's saying. Well, that Saturday I had given blood at the local Y. The first time since 1995. I got woozy after that one. The first one, when I was still 18, I had jumped right off that bed barely phased. I had thought it was a sign that I was getting old.
It must have been an even weirder day for E2 denizens. (I didn't join until September of 2003).
A few years ago I went and read the entries on September 11, 2001 daylogs. I was surprised to see that the first writings there were about a tragic loss - but they had nothing to do with the attacks. They must have been written before they had happened. A member named Hermetic had committed suicide. Suddenly those "/me misses Hermetic"s I had seen in the catbox made sense. How bizarre, I thought. It had already been quite a melancholy day for E2 on 9/11 when the attacks happened. I find it difficult to imagine what it must have been like to already be dealing with news like that when suddenly the sky starts falling on top of it. As morbid as this may sound, I almost wish I had joined E2 earlier, to be a part of it when it was younger, more raw, and mourned all that with you guys. Yes I am a freak, who here isn't?
It is quite a melancholy day today for me. It's my first day back to work from a 10-day vacation. It's rainy, cloudy, and cool for an early September day. It's back to work, summer is dying, a former favorite radio station of mine in St. Louis morphed sometime late last night into this shitty hip hop station, and we are still in baby limbo. The wife's hormone levels are still going up, another test revealed, but not near where they should be, and not doubling from day to day like they should. We have to wait until September 21st to know anything for sure. Ten days seems like an eternity when you're waiting to find out something like that.
Waiting sucks.
Whenever I see footage from that tragic day, especially photos or whatnot depicting the people jumping to their deaths, preferring that over cooking in an inferno, I tear up. And I don't cry often. As beaten as this horse is, as cliche as it sounds, as much as it sounds like I'm going to break into a country music song (don't worry I can't stand that genre), I have to say it: We must never forget. That means different things to different people. To some, it means that Muslims are out to kill us, don't underestimate them, especially the radicals. To others, it simply means that freedom is expensive, that maybe out foreign policies need tweaking. To all, it means that we are not as safe as we once thought. The great United States of America is vulnerable. There is plenty of kryptonite out there for our Superman and lots of Lex Luthors out there ready to use it.
I will not let my son (and hopefully another son or daughter) just let it be a history lesson for him/them, a chapter in a textbook. I kept papers from that day and days after, the magazines like Newsweek... I will show him the cover from that, the pictures inside, especially the one showing the tiny people falling through the air next to the smoke and fire, the ones they probably won't see in class. And I will take them to "Ground Zero," as it were. Hopefully they might feel something about it, for the people that went through it, maybe they'll tear up like I do.
Probably not, but we'll see.