I thought it was likely an electrical substation 1/2 mile away next to a fire station, but oddly there was no sound of sirens for at least 15 minutes.

A few minutes later I was making coffee, the phone rang and a close-to-hysterical woman on the other end began shouting to turn on the TV, planes have crashed into the WTC and the Pentagon … it was my office manager on the 9-to-5 shift, and I didn’t even recognize her voice. As the TV came on, the first tower fell (but I think it was the CNN crew was still talking about two planes hitting the WTC, not about what was literally happening that moment, and as the ash cloud billowed away from the site I could make out only the one tower left standing). It took the TV folks a minute or two to realize one of the towers had fallen … and at that point there were only voice reports (no video) from the Pentagon, which included all kinds of fragmentary, unverified bits about a bomb going off at the State Dept., evacuations at the White House and Capitol, maybe the Metro subway system shutting down etc.

At which point the EMT/fire/police vehicle sirens were echoing nonstop off the surrounding hills. And several fighter jets suddenly roared low overhead.

Though I went to work that day a couple miles away in a western suburb, we were sent home after only a couple hours … I stuck to back roads and side streets, as the traffic on the main roads was rush-hour thick with people evacuating D.C. Like the rest of the nation, I stayed glued to the TV the rest of the day.

With time, I realized of course that the curtains bulging that morning was the shock wave from the Pentagon, over 3 miles away as the crow flies.

And I eventually dwelt on the sole time I’d visited the WTC (in 1987, with a friend from DC). We’d enjoyed the swift express elevator ride to/from the WTC 2 observation deck and spent over an hour up there on both the inside and outside decks, but after we’d left the building and were walking toward the Staten Island ferry, he remarked how relieved he was to be outta there. He said he didn’t usually have qualms about being on high buildings or bridges (though he was terrified of being in airplanes), but he’d had the strangest sense that those buildings would someday collapse — and though he didn’t feel it would happen in his lifetime, he intuited that I would witness it someday. (He was right — he passed away from AIDS in 1993.)

Though my father had years before suffered a mild stroke and thereafter, declining health, he had been well cared for at home by my mother, a registered nurse. Because could not live on his own, he too moved into the nursing home, where he shared a room with his dying wife of nearly 55 years. I returned to California.

My mother declined rapidly and steadily, and on September 7th, the hospice nurse said that she could die “at any time.”

On September 11th, I was asleep in California. My partner woke me holding the phone. “It’s your Uncle John,” she said “he wants to tell you that your mother died.” As she handed me the phone, she added “Oh, Chris called and said a plane has run into some building.” My uncle told me that my mother had died that morning, and that my father had had trouble trying to call me.

When I hung up the phone, I remembered having a childhood helium balloon and losing my grip on the string. Realizing instantly that I’d lost it, I watched my balloon float slowly up, grow ever smaller, and finally disappear. Then I remembered saying goodbye to my mother in August. Though I could see her, she was essentially gone. On September 11th, she finally disappeared.

I spent the next few hours staring at the television.

I had just dropped my girlfriend (now wife) off at her student teaching post in San Francisco. Turned the radio on and Bob Edwards slowly rolled out the scenario, I guess both towers were flattened by that time. I drove to the sunset district, parked and used a pay phone to ckeck in with a friend and my Mom. I was born at St. Vincent’s Hospital on Manhattan in 1961, so an attack on the island hits close, even though I can hardly stand more than a day in NYC these days. I’m just not a New Yorker anymore, but I sure was on that day and for many days after.

I’m also not a television person, especially regarding grotesque and horrifying events. I didn’t turn on a television until Friday of that week, when they were just starting to ramp the message around into We Will Destroy. Even listening to NPR coverage of the week, my sense was of seeing the giant crossbow of American military might being slowly drawn back and that there would be huge retaliation. Something Republican presidents are great about: the predictability of the military knee response, and then the demagoguery that goes along and convices a public that this response is natural, necessary and right. I was sickened and even expected Bush and Cheney to go nukular, but I guess they only got so far as Bunker Busting.

Pamela and I walked dazed around San Francisco and ended up in Washington Square Park in North Beach for some of the day, just seeking out a peaceful place. I cried a lot in the morning and was on the verge for several days. Sad for both they who had died and those who inevitably would from The Response.

I worked at a little NPR/Pacifica station in Mendocino County and had to make my way from SF up to Philo that evening to host a music show. Driving over the Golden Gate Bridge was beyond surreal, and yes I expected more hits and imagined it was on the list. As you might guess, the radio show was mostly a call-in talk out that night, letting people say what’s on their mind and I played a few Requiem like pieces and said a few things about sorrow for the souls forced to flee this life that day. Did I play Ivor Cutler and Linda Hirst’s “Women of The World”? I don’t recall.

“Women of the World take over.
Because if you don’t the World will come to an end.
And we haven’t got long.”

Best wises.
Owen

Just sat there watching, aghast. None of the newscasters seemed to know anything. I heard people yelling in my street at one point–went to the window, saw people spilling out of the brownstones around me and hurrying to the end of the block. Saw at least one guy in gray coveralls with a pistol in his hand, frantically waving people off the street. Turns out some fool left a step-van parked in the middle of the street, and someone else called it in as a bomb threat, so we had to vacate the block while the bomb squad checked the truck. (Fortunately my building is down the block from a big DHS/FBI/Secret Service/ATF office building, so we had help pretty quick.)

A thick, dirty, wet, smoke-smell permeated everything. My neighborhood, all the way down to the WTC site, was cordoned off–no vehicles or pedestrians allowed except police and emergency vehicles and personnel. Except, as the day wore into evening and overnight turned into sunrise, a double-file caravan of heavy construction equipment materialized–some of it brand-new, some crusted with dirt and mud, bearing license plates from all over the Eastern US–and parked along Sixth Avenue, silently facing downtown, toward the Hole.

The next night around 11PM, a friend called from LA, worried sick. Not so much about me, as about her 84-year-old mother who lived alone on the Lower East Side. Phones were out–would I go check on her? Made my way south through the dark, still streets, kept encountering security perimeters that blocked me from getting further south. Had to sneak all the way east to the river, found a hole in the security cordon and crossed under the Williamsburg bridge, plunged into the blacked-out area below Delancey, tripped and fell a couple times over unseen objects in vacant lots.

Stepped out of the gloom into a floodlit area, and the mother’s apartment building (full of elderly residents) was lit up by an emergency generator. She answered her buzzer, graciously welcomed me in as if she was throwing a party and I was the guest of honor, and we had a lovely visit. (Plucky and resourceful even though without electricity, she told me how she’d showed a much younger neighbor how to cook a potato on the gas stovetop.)

Heading home, I took Canal Street across town. Bare of traffic, like every other street, except for a seemingly endless line of massive dump trucks, heading nose-to-tail from the Hole to Arthur Kill to dump their loads of debris from the site.

It was a combination of eery familiarity and the disquieting awareness of everything changing–a new-found lack of safety. Kept a loaded pistol handy in the house for a short time. Knew it was silly and probably dangerous, but felt a little safer. Visited the site–a five-story pile of smoking construction rubble.

Sad how altered this country has become since then, at the hands of Bush and Cheney.

Metro North began running again late in the evening and I took the train to Katonah train station which was covered with cops inspecting cars in the parking lot and I noticed anxious wives talking to cops and learned that many of the cars in the parking lot had belonged to husbands killed in the attack. It was a tragic scene and I stayed to talk with one woman who later learned her husband had been killed. Wives stayed at the station all night hoping their husbands would return.

Well said, indeed. Unfortunately, I think this administration has caused our nation to stop being who we are, encouraging people to wallow in fear while they trample the Constitution. It’s time to remember, to not be afraid, and to start being again the America that so many others admired us for being. It starts with pulling the “D” lever in November, and encouraging enough of our fellow citizens to do the same.

Exactly. Was a history major UG and did my masters thesis on FDR’s opinion of Hitler before our entrance into WWII. I knew I had learned intellectually about the darkest sides of human nature….but missed the emotional component.

It’s wholly another thing to watch those forces play out in bas relief…especially in one’s own backyard. I am firmly convinced that all of our responses to the tragedy of 9/11 are exactly what Osama bin Laden would have hoped/wished for.