story9955.xml

story9955.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2003-09-11

We had just came back from our 2 week vacation to North Carolina where we spent the most beautiful, loving summer. The plane back was delayed in St. Louis and it was either very late at night or very early in the morning when we arrived to San Jose Airport and then to our apartment, with our bags unpacked sitting all over the living room we were sleeping deeply and streched out in our beds when i heard the phone but was too tired to rush to see who was calling, but i did got up and checked the machine which had just stopped recording a message from my mother-in-law. She said something containing the words: attack, New York, Pentagon, sorry, turn your tv. From the bedroom my husband asked who was it, "It's your mom, she said to turn the tv" so i searched for the remote and there it was the image of smoke and fire on a tall building. Trying to gather together information, thoughts and myself, shivers and weakness was felt all over my body, and my husband said something like: it looks like a movie. We had been watching for a long time without a word. We hugged, we thought of us just being aboard planes ourselves and the Lord watching over us making sure that it wasn't that the way we would die, that that horrible unthinkable, yet visible thing would not happen to us. We felt the pain of people just like us from all across the country getting to us, and we thank God for His mercy. We never thought of how precious was going to be that last innocent summer we had just spent. No more would we feel neither absolutely safe nor absolutely trusting nor absolutely free. We did dare to fly again after that but we had been robbed of that warm first-sight welcome and of that last kiss good-bye, robbed of the way we viewed our home, this great country. Now a baby had just recently been born to us, all we can do is hope, pray, and have the assurance that a mighty force greater than ourselves will keep him safe, will make him trust, will make him free.