First and foremost, I gotta wish Laura a happy birthday, so…Happy Birthday!
I was thinking about writing some sort of commentary, essay, or thought-provoking 9/11 piece, but anything I came up with sounded either sappy, clichéd, redundant, insensitive, or bizarre, so I gave up on the idea. Maybe in another five years. Right now, the rain has finally started to fall, after threatening to do so all day. I guess you could say it’s appropriate.
I swore I wouldn’t do it, but I ended up on cnn.com watching some of the footage that they originally broadcast when it happened. It’s kind of weird watching it, because I never really got to see any of the major events “as they happened.” I didn’t learn about the attacks until after all the planes had crashed, I didn’t start watching the TV coverage until just after the first tower collapse, and I left for work just prior to the second tower collapse (I did end up being the one to tell pretty much the entire library staff what was going on). I was almost afraid to go to French class because it seemed that every time I stopped watching TV, something else would happen (and yet, I did go to French, but I couldn’t tell you what we learned in class that day). From a journalistic/media viewpoint, up until the second plane hit, the reporters and anchors seemed to be in a “business as usual” mode, like they would be when covering a fire or other type of breaking news story. Terrorism wasn’t even mentioned until several minutes after the second plane hit (and what I found odd was that it took them quite a while to realize there was another plane, even though you could clearly see it on TV; they originally thought that the fuselage from the first plane exploded). This is gonna sound rather insensitive, but I will tell you that, five years ago, my first thought after seeing a photo of the towers (before they collapsed, and before I started watching it on TV) was “How are they gonna repair that?” For some reason, it didn’t occur to me right away that people were dying. I guess maybe at that point it hadn’t really sunk in yet. Sometimes I wonder about the people I saw when I went there back in 1995, like the security guards and the businesswomen behind us in line for the elevator, or the other people on the elevator who made disapproving-but-amused looks at one of the kids in my group when he reacted badly to the high speed of the elevator. I wonder if they were still there in 2001, and if they got out alive, but I guess I’ll never know.
There is one other thing that I’ve never been able to figure out. The day before it happened, I was at work, and I overheard my supervisor telling one of the other library employees about visiting her son in New York. At that moment, this exact thought popped into my head: “I have a picture of where they bombed the World Trade Center.” This is true, but I have no idea why I thought of it right then. Weird.
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