I remember waking up to the clock radio and hitting snooze a couple of times. "Blah, blah, World Trade Center"
And I started the day with just a throw-away groggy thought... "they sure are talking a lot about New York today." And off we went to start our day.
About an hour later I'm walking to the train station and I get a call from Doni, my Austin co-worker at the time.
"Are you in the office?"
"Not yet, on my way, why?"
"Get there fast, we need you for some emergency communications stuff."
"Why, what happened?"
"You don't know? Two planes just hit the world trade center in New York."
"What? Uh, ok well I'll be in as fast as the train can get me there"
How could I have been so oblivious? The clock radio thing made sense now. By the time I reached the shuttle, Kirsten called and wanted me to come home. She was pretty freaked out. But duty called and we were pretty sure there was no immediate danger to us since by then we had figured out all the planes had been grounded.
So I spent the day posting information to the Intranet about what was going on and how it affected the company. We also had a CC-TV system in all the buildings tuned away from the regular corporate slide show and tuned to news stations instead. The web was actually unreachable from our desktops for many hours that day as I recall, due to the traffic, so live TV became the outlet of choice.
(Interestingly, or not, upper management decided to take the TV system out of commission a few years later, as people were getting all their info from the web at that point. The only justification for keeping them was for another 9/11, and they chose to focus on the positive possibility that it would not happen again. So far, so good.)
Obviously very little work was done that day. People were standing around riveted at the TVs.
I know I spoke with this co-worker that day, and had no idea what was going on with her: Monkey Business: Remembering.
But the crushing blow for Kirsten and I personally came that evening, watching the local news, and seeing the picture of our friend who died on Flight 93. Kirsten had know Mark since just after high school, and we had reconnected a few years earlier at a friend's wedding. I had not know him as long or as well as Kirsten had, but Mark was the kind of guy that you just got a good feeling from and I liked him right away. When we reconnected with him, Mark was just starting his PR firm, and Kirsten was just starting her freelance web design business. So of course he says "I need a web site!" and he became one of her first clients.
So his picture flashes on the screen "...local man Mark Bingham among those on Flight 93..." The hours and days that followed were a blur of phone calls and memorials and now the memory of that time is foggy. Well, the experience of that time was foggy... just indescribable sadness and shock that kept the clouds dense in my head for a long time.
A few years later, my band was on tour as Bush-Cheney were spouting their streak of lies to start a war in Iraq. I remember any time on that trip we stopped into a bar or someone's house that had the news on just hearing the lies repeated so many times they became "the truth" and feeling like I was in a twilight zone. Did I miss something? Is Afghanistan all taken care of already? No? Well did they catch the guys that killed our friend? No? Well wtf is this all about?
And then we got stuck in a blizzard in Denver and watched the Iraq war start on TV. The clouds and the fog were back.
So yesterday, on the 7th anniversary of that day, as I was driving after dropping my daughter off at day care, I passed by a local fire station. There was a ceremony being held at that moment, firefighters all in their dress blues with flags and a small crowd gathered. I didn't stop. Just stopped to remember that day, again, and let the fog creep back in again for a little while.
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