story2475.xml

story2475.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

I sat home on Sept 11, 2001 because it is the time of year when I take my vacation. My birthday is September 6th, my 3 year wedding anniversary was Sept 5th and I was messing around in the house doing little odd jobs. The phone rang about 8:55...it was my brother-in-law asking me if I was watching the news...of course I wasn't, I had long since finished watching the local news and had moved on the one of my favorite shows "I Love Lucy". He asked me to sit down in front of the TV and turn on a local station...he said any one of them would be fine....I punched channel 5 on the remote and was immediately shocked into silence. I sat there holding the phone, unable to speak, glued to the awful sights that were being broadcast on national TV. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself as the tears begin to fall for the people who would loose their lives that day. And we sat there together...him listening to his news station and me to mine...and together we watched the second plane crash into the other tower. Now he was at work at UNC hospitals....people were frantic, they were crying and I could h ear them in the background with much the same expressions that I was having. Oh, my God?!!! What in the world is going on. It took a while before we heard them saying it was an attack, and then we heard the awful news...there was another plane that appeared to be hi-jacked...and then another. It was too crazy to think about...I eventually had to hang up from breathing over the phone line with him because my call-waiting was clicking off the hook. My sister-in-law, my 2 best friends, my mother, my grandma...all of us calling each other to say how much we loved them, to check on there where-abouts, to make sure we were all safe. And then I went crazy...well almost crazy...as I tried for hour after hour to get someone in my husbands family on the phone. His grandma, 3 aunts and a host of other relatives lived in Brooklyn...I wanted to ensure that they all were safe. But the lines were busy, or fast busy indicating they were disconnected, and the "all circuts are busy" was just about to drive me insane. Finally, I think my mother-in-law called to say she had spoken with her mother and sister and they were all ok, but it was chaos in the city! And after all of that died down, and the plane crashed into the Pentagon, and the other one was forced down in that field in Philadelphia...well, what else could I do. I sat in my floor and cried, I prayed for all the lives that were touched by this tragedy, I prayed hard and long for the evil folks who thought this was a great idea. I cried because I wanted to do something, I cried because I felt like I coudln't do anything. I called everyone I could think of and who's numbers Iknew by heart, just to say I loved them. And the worse the pictures got on the TV, the tighter I stayed glued to it...because there was nothing else I felt like I could do from my little-bitty-what-I- thought-was-safe-home in Chapel Hill North Carolina. Because quickly you realize how easily it could have been me. And for days, weeks even, after this, every time I heard a plane or helicopter in the sky, I thought for sure it was crashing into something near me, dropping a bomb or something else devastating. But what was even more scary was the hours and days right after the attack when the skies were silent..almost as if it were a permenant moment of silence.