nmah1982.xml

nmah1982.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-09

I still haven't cried. We'd been out the night before with friends, and we were sleeping in. I had my earplugs in, so I wouldn't hear the upstairs neighbor's son running around. The phone rang, and I didn't stir. My boyfriend woke up, and made a dash for it, but missed the call. It went to the answering service. The message was from my best friend Heather, who lived three blocks away from us. She was screaming into the phone "I hope that when you were in New York two weeks ago you went to the World Trade Center, cause it just fucking blew up!!! Call me back!" Andy called her right back, groggy with sleep, and not for a second understanding what her message meant. When the call was done, he came back through to the bedroom.

"Wake up, baby, the Americans have gone to war, and they don't know who with. The Twin Towers burned down. We have to go to Heather's." He said, gently nudging me awake. I opened one eye, saw the strained, confused look on his face, took out one earplug and said, "Whaaat? What are you talking about?" He told me Nevermind, that we had to get over to Heather's. You see, I dislike commercial television, and never bothered installing an antenna or anything on mine. I only used it to watch videos. So I threw on some clothes, and we headed to Heather's. It was about 10:30 in the morning, but the streets were quiet; deserted. Like some post-apocolyptic ghost town.

When she opened the door, she threw her arms around me and cried, "It's so horrible!" I walked into her living room, looked at the television, and began to laugh. Over and over the Twin Towers swayed, and collapsed. Over and over a plane flew into the side of each one. Over and over Peter Jennings ran his hand in a downward motion across his eyes, as if he could make the images go away. Once my initial laugh had died away, it turned to full-fledged shock. I sat on the sofa, like so many others that day, and watched. I couldn't look away. Maybe I didn't blink. But I laughed. It was too hard to cry. Besides, it wasn't real! How on earth could it be real? Yet there it was, time after time, first the planes, the flames, then the collapse. That huge cloud of dust that spilled through downtown Manhattan still haunts me.

The rest of the day passed in a blur of smoke and take-out. We went to the home of a friend of ours, an out-of-work journalist who still had good contacts. We were getting the story from all available mediums - TV, phone, net, and journalists finishing their shifts and stopping by. We got take-out because we couldn't take our eyes off the television long enough to cook. It was an End Of The World party. That's what we called it.

Dan Rather got tired and said things like Great...balls...of...fire, and we laughed because we felt sorry for him. Peter Jennings got even more tired, and described the collapse of the Towers "Poof, gone". At that point we knew it was time for Peter to go home, but on and on he battled, another of the heroes of the day.

Everyone's life has changed since that day. We saw the USA, Canada, Britain and other assorted Allies march off to a war with no beginning and no end. A war that had no clear enemy - an attack that had no clear target. We, as citizens, stood behind our soldiers and politicians, in a way we perhaps have never done, even though deep inside we knew it was a war we could not win. Not yet. Not if it was fought in haste.

I am not afraid to fly. I do not fear crowded places or large events. But one night, sitting in a cinema watching Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears, I finally cried. I cried for New York, I cried for Washington. I cried for dead police and firefighters. I cried for my home. Sum of All Fears was filmed in Montréal. My city was dressed up to look like Baltimore (and not very well, I might add), and I had to watch a nuclear bomb turn it into a smoking ruin. I cried. Montréal is only a few hundred miles from New York. We are their Canadian Twin City. Montréalers feel New York in a way that other cities do not. I mourned. For all of us. It only took 11 months...

Everything, bad and good. Living in Scotland now, I have watched the readers of a local British free paper quibble over whether or not it should be written 9/11 (the American Way) or 11/9 (the British way). It's not important how we write it, just that we write it at all. We can't let ourselves forget this - ever. We need to remember that depraved animals from another country - another world - tried to tear us apart. And we need to remember that no matter how hard they tried, we just got closer.

My fondest memory of the day, the only one that gave me a little peace, was Giuliani walking through the early stages of the rubble, hard hat on, and a policeman told him "You can't come this way, Sir, it's too dangerous." Not even breaking his stride, Giuliani said "Fine, we'll go this way!" it was his city, his towers, and if they were going to burn, he was going to be there!

I flew an American flag outside my Scottish flat this past 4th of July. And the company I work for is American, so we have a big Stars and Stripes in our lobby. It's nice to see every day. Reminds me of home. On Wednesday, September 11, 2002, I will place a single white rose on it. I will remember what it stands for