9/11 Memories…Where Were You?

We have a collective memory about today’s anniversary date. Where were YOU on 9/11?

I remember the bright sunshine of the day. It was very sunny on Tuesday, Sept 11, 2001. I was getting my eyes checked at my eye doctor, Brian Wadman, who had an office on Gatehouse Road, and at about 8:46am, I had my pupils dilated for that test they do every time at the annual eye check up.  At that moment, I really could not see. My pupils were black, solid and huge and it was a strange state in which to absorb the terrible news about the towers and the Pentagon.

When the women in the office began talking about the plane crash. Into the Tower. How strange!  Nobody thought it was an attack, it was an accident…but it didn’t take long for this to change, as we all know.

I nervously went to work at Transitions Abroad magazine in South Amherst, where they didn’t have TVs. So we watched the whole event unfold by watching the web only, no broadcasts.

I remember meeting Kate and my nephew, Will Hartshorne, who had just come here for a visit, and Sam, we all returned to the house in a daze. We left the TV news on for the next week, so many reports, so many fearful events, threats and terrible new people we’d come to know much better in the weeks ahead.

We stayed up many, many hours, mesmerized by the dialog on TV, the narratives of good and evil and WHY?

I am very glad we haven’t had an incident as catastrophic as that since then.  But I don’t feel safe, I feel scared. Scared about our leadership and the number of devious and insanely evil plots people think of and want to subject people to.

I feel like we’ve given the beat down to so many terrorist leaders, and turned their reputations in the West into really bad narratives, that we have them in submission. Then I think about new ways they could hurt us, and it gets scary again.

It’s hard for all of us, I’m sure, to believe that 9/11 was 16 long years ago.  Things have changed so much, the saddest thing is how fast the time slips by.