story137.xml

story137.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-03-05

My husband was still sleeping; he always has Tuesdays off. I was up, puttering around, making coffee. It was a hot day, so we had the AC on and the shades drawn. The phone rang; it was my mother-in-law in Ohio. She sounded anxious and asked if we were okay. I glanced over at my husband on the bed in his underpants. "Yeah, we're okay." She said that the world trade center was gone. It made no sense to me. I stammered to my mother-in-law, "Uh, hold on, just a minute please." I went over to the window and moved the blinds. I couldn't believe what I saw. Instead of the glistening lower Manhattan skyline, there was just a giant pyroclastic flow of black smoke. I went back to the phone and said, "Holy Shit!" to my church going mother-in-law. My next words were, "I gotta sit down. My knees are weak. What happened?" She told me to turn on the TV. I hung up and screamed at my husband, "Get up, look!" I turned on the TV and could only get one station and it was fuzzy at that. I told my husband that we had to fill up every container we had with water, go to the bank, get some money and go grocery shopping for stuff like canned milk and dried beans. We ran into a neighbor who had just driven from lower Manhattan. She was sobbing and hiccuping, saying over and over, "I can't believe I got out." Later we went up to the roof and saw everybody walking across the Brooklyn Bridge as billows and billows of smoke continued to blossom out of lower Manhattan. We walked over to Ft. Greene Park and glumly sat on the steps watching the smoke. The next day we walked over to the Brooklyn Promenade and spent some time on the roof of a friend's in Brooklyn Heights. Another building collapsed on Wednesday sending another giant plume skyward. We ran into a friend who had been on the promenade when the towers collapsed and she said that people were screaming and throwing up and falling down on the ground. For days, everybody was walking around with puffy, blotchy, pale faces with a dazed look. I left Brooklyn the following Monday and have not been back.