Memories of 9/11Follow

I was getting ready for work when I flipped on the TV to catch the weather. They were showing the first building on fire but still reporting it as a plane crash rather than a terrorist attack. I switched the TV off and drove to work while they started to put it together on the radio. By that time the second building was hit and we had a thread called "Holy Crow!" going on in the old uBB Allakhazam Everquest boards. Since a lot of people didn't have access to a radio/TV at work and the news sites were completely lagged out, those of us who could listened to the radio/TV and posted updates to the thread.

Me, I was in a towel in my studio apartment getting ready for work. I turned the TV on, saw the first tower burning then watched another plane smash into the second tower live. I forget who the news commentator was but he went from saying "there has been an accident a plane struck into the WTC" then when the second plane hit, now with despair in his voice, "this, is no accident, we are under attack."

So I went to work @ the Mall (Aldo) and the place was a ghost town. Everyone that worked there was huddled around the Comcast TV kiosk watching the news unfold. Then one lady yelled at me to come back cause she wanted to buy a pair of shoes.

My wife still has trouble watching the footage. She worked in the building next door (forget which one). She was one of the Ghost People you saw on the news running away from the building. She lost a lot of co-workers and some friends that day. Its amazing how many people would go in and out of the WTC Towers in a days time for meetings and what not.

I had a morning class and when I got to the University I noticed that a lot of people were crying. I thought this was a bit weird but hey, at university anything is possible. My class was "cancelled" in so much as we didn't discuss class related things but spent the hour talking about our feelings in light of the tragedy unfolding on NY. One chick screeched that she was terrified that her father was going to die - her father living in Toronto.

Sooo, I went home and got in just in time to see the first tower crumble. I just remember feeling like I had just witnessed something incredible. Something that was going to change the world.

I suppose in part they were just obvious, easy targets. /shrug

Planning on giving blood today as my memoriam.

I plan on half-watching Loose Change and starting threads about how the government brought the towers down with termites.

I was 21 at the time, working for a wholesale food delivery service for Italian restaurants throughout New England. I was on my Tuesday route which brought me very far south into Connecticut and I would work my way up through Farmington into Hartford before I hit the highway to come home. I arrived at my first stop just after the first plane hit, and I hadn't heard yet. While unloading the truck, I noticed the front door of my first stop wasn't propped open like usual, so upon checking I noticed the door was locked. I knocked, and the morning guy came and opened up and said I had to come see something. I went inside and saw the news...and I was floored. They were still speculating at that time that it may have been an accident, so I went out to continue bringing food in. Shortly after my second run in the 2nd plane hit.

I couldn't believe it, I really didn't know what to think at that moment. I was all by myself (usually have a partner, but I was always solo on my Tuesday run). Upon reaching my second stop, the customer wasn't there to take the delivery. I called into the office to see what what going on and what I should do. At that moment it really hadn't hit me...and here's what made this day so horrible for me. Throughout Hartford and Farmington, and along my whole route that day...I would deliver to many many Middle Eastern run "Italian" shops. The office told me to continue my run and avoid any stops that give me problems or aren't there to accept delivery.

The variations of things I saw and heard that day left me absolutely devastated. I mean, I'm a pretty resilient person, but this stuff just shook me. I'll never forget walking into a shop mid-run as I would enter Hartford just after leaving Farmington. They were the nicest group of people, always giving me an afternoon lunch grinder & drink for free, and always very polite (which is rare with the job I was doing). I walked into their building that day to find every single member of that family in tears...they realized what kind of discrimination they would receive, and how the events of that day would affect their life indefinitely. I can only imagine leaving how it must feel for someone like that, that left the horrible conditions of the Middle East to come to America to build a new life for themselves, and then have that terror and fear brought to them in their new home.

I'll also never forget the next mornings first stop, which was again out in Connecticut outside Hartford. I guess you could call them "pro-9/11" since I ended up having to threaten them with a broomstick, duck tail and run as I was called a horrible American and they were cheering in support of the day before. They were spewing words in foreign tongue and telling us we deserved it. It was horrible. The following weeks were rough at that job, seeing places shutdown due to lack of business from prejudice judgement because of their nationality. The unending string day after day of varying emotions from people. I think of it now, 6 years later, and I can still remember almost every stop that day. I can't remember yesterday, or last week as clearly. It's still disturbing.

I was in between interning schools. I was actually the first one to bring to attention what was going to the principal. We all sat around in his office and watched the first one. At that time no one really thought it was muslim terrorists. Some of the teachers even turned on their tv's in the classroom. That is until the second one hit. At that point the principal came on the loud speaker and asked the teachers to turn off their tv's. They cancelled school for the rest of the day.

I was just south of Rome, doing a semester abroad. I came down from the student villa and a friend ran up to me and babbling something about a terrorist attack on the WTC. I thought she was joking at first. For the next two hours we all sat in a stupor, listening to an Italian newscaster on the TV, none of us understanding what he was saying, looking at the images of the burning towers.

The faculty was scared that the attack would inflame anti-American sentiments, so the campus was put on lock down for a couple days, a bunch of trips were canceled, people went back to the states because either they or their parents were scared *********

On Sept. 12, the lawn of the American embassy in Rome was covered in flowers. I felt for a glittering moment that the world was with us.

I'm not sure why, but I went to CNN that morning and saw that their entire website had been taken down for a huge splash page about how we were under attack so I turned on the tv and saw it. It was my first day of my new student job at a federal building on campus so I found out that I didn't have to go because all federal buildings were closed. I'd woken Mr. Pikko up and he was all irritated that I'd woken him up for a plane crash, then the tower came down and he knew it was more serious than that. We just watched the news together until he had to go to work I think.

I was working up in Vail on the new Ritz-Carlton. I remember overhearing a bunch of construction workers talking about someone flying a plane into the WTC. I figured it was some idiot in a small cessna or something who was all hopped up on mamosas or the like. Later I heard someone else saying there were two planes, and yet someone else saying it was a missle, and someone else saying someone hit the Pentagon too. I figured it was all bullShit and the rumor mill was going into overdrive. When I finally took lunch there was a radio playing at a nearby group tuned into the news and that's when I started getting a real picture as to what was going on. But I didn't really get the whole scoop till that night when I got back to my hotel room and watched the news.

I assumed it had something to do with antisemitism and the paranoid delusions that through the mechanisms of international trade Jews sort of "run the world" and "keep the Muslims down".

9/11 began as a normal day for me on the West Coast. I woke up, got the kids up for school and daycare and just started my routine. Ray left about a month and a half before for what was supposed to be his 6 month regular cruise to the Persian Gulf.

At about 6:30 in the morning, Ray called me. That was normal. With the 14+ hour time difference, Ray would call when it was nighttime for him. But to call off the boat was freaking expensive, $1.00 per minute. And I already had a $350 phone bill the month before. So I was keeping my eye on the clock. Ray asked me if I saw the news. Now, I saw the news the night before with the usual unrest in the Middle East, blah blah blah. I told him I saw it, but the kids and I were fine and we'd be all right and for him not to worry. I asked him about his care package if he got it and for him to share it with the guys in his shop. I know Ray was thinking I was being awfully cavalier and nonchalant, but I truly didn't know about the WTC at that time. Ray told me he loved me and the kids and I told him I loved him too. And I told him to get some rest and I'd talk to him soon. And we hung up.

Then I turn on the television and realized that I should have kept Ray on the phone as long as I could until all communication was cut off. Granted, he was on the boat in the middle of the Persian Gulf, but that didn't guarantee his safety just because he wouldn't be on the frontlines with the Army and Marines.

The kids still had school that day and I made the decision to keep the routine as normal as possible. So I joked around with the kids and finished up getting them ready and took them to school. And that's when it got eerie. We lived on a military installation. You could see security on the base tightening up everywhere. Usually you could see just security driving around and at the gates, but their presence was just everywhere that day. I dropped the kids off and headed out to work, and I could see that at the front gate, measures were being taken to buff up the gates.

Two hours later, I got a call from someone telling me that the gates were going to be shut and the base was going on lockdown. I booked it home and got the kids. Anthony & Steven were at school and Charmaine was at the daycare center. We stayed at the house for the afternoon until I realized that we had no milk, no juice, no water, nothing (payday was 4 days away and well, groceries were getting lean). So I hauled the kids up into the car and headed out into town because all non-essential buildings on the base were closed for that day for security reasons, but the gates opened back up at least.

Got what I needed and headed back to the base, and ended up staying in a 3+ hour line to get through the gate because every car and person and bag was being searched. Trying to have 3 young kids in the car in the heat comfortable and entertained is an impossibility. But we got through it. The boys knew something was going on because the teachers were talking about it at school. So I answered their questions as simply as possible. "Some bad guys did something very bad in New York. Since Daddy's a good guy, he went with the other good guys to go get the bad guys." I can say that when my car was finally searched, Steven was so interested in the automatic weapon the guard was carrying that he just had to touch it, to which I slapped his hand as soon as I realized what he was reaching for.

When I finally got home, we just sat around and watched the news. I don't even remember if we ate supper that night. School was cancelled for the following day, but instead of a bunch of kids outside playing and having fun because of no school, EVERYONE stayed inside. It was just so surreal.

Ray was not able to call for about 2 weeks or so. He wasn't even able to email. But I kept emailing him, just to let him know that the kids and I were thinking of him and love him so much. When he came home the following January, the media was out in force because his squadron was the first to drop a bomb on Afghanistan (the squadron kept the video and we have the video of it). Seeing Ray finally come off the boat was the best relief for me and I didn't realize how much tension I was carrying within me when he was gone among all this.

I look back on 9/11, not as how the country changed, or how other people were affected, but how the kids and I had to face it. If anything, it did make my family bond a little bit stronger (my adoption of the boys was finalized right before Ray came home) because we knew no matter what, we had each other, something other people could no longer say they had.

Oh, and today is also my Lola's birthday. So Happy Birthday Lola. We still miss you and love you.

It was my first day back at the day program I'm in, after my mother had died of breast cancer on Sept. 1. They serve breakfast every morning at 9 and have a large screen T.V., that was turn on to some Judge July type of show most mornings, after the local news. I walked in just in time to see them repeat the details of the first plane, that then was still thought to be some small private plane off course. Then they went to the live camera showing the second plane hitting the tower.

I just stood there in tears, thinking of how much I needed my mother right then. She had always made sure to watch the news and we had to run to get her the instant any special report notice came on. Growing up we had all sat with her, during every major event glued to the T.V. One of my friends gave me a hug, then and the center cancel all the normal groups, so we could sit together and watch the news until it was time to go home.

Jonwin had been unaware of what happen, so I had to tell him to turn on the T>V when I got home. My daughter was worried about her her mother-in-law was Ok, since I knew some of my son-in-laws family work in Manhattan. His uncle was in a building next door to the twin towers at the time. We waited for hours to hear from his mom and Uncle to learn how they had made it home safely.

I still find myself getting more depress at the beginning of September, I can't watch all the memorial services, as 9/11 is forever link with losing my mom in my mind. I'm glad she didn't live long enough to watch how the administration has used 9/11 to undermined the U.S Constitution with it's ****. She wouldn't have let anyone hear the last of it and ranting constantly, while she watch C-Span. Not that she hadn't ranted constantly at any senator or congressman, she thought was wrong.