1) I was to fly out to San Diego later that night for work. It would’ve been my first time in California (I have yet to go). I went in to the office to gather some things to take with me. On the way in, I heard NPR sayings something about a plane crashing into the Pentagon. I thought very little of it until I arrived in my office to my mother calling and asking was I okay – and then saying she needed to get off the phone when the second plane hit the other WTC tower (not the actual sequence of events, but the way she and I experienced it). Naively (I realize now), I still packed my stuff thinking I would make it to San Diego before midnight.
2) I leave work after alarms go off at the Monarch Tower in Buckhead – a supposed bomb threat. The parking lot is jammed with people wanting to get out. All emergency protocol is thrown aside as we are fearing that our building may be attacked to. Ironic that the naivete that made me think I may be able to fly out to California later that day did not come into play when reckoning with the likelihood of my own office being attacked.
3) Fat and tired, as I was much of the time in those years, I made it home in the late morning. I called Kathy and she said she would be home a little later. I started drinking whiskey and coke.
4) Kathy would arrive and Tommy T., our contractor friend – staying in an extended stay – would later arrive. Tommy brought scotch. We would tire of watching the video footage on CNN, but could not bring ourselves to change the channel. We would get drunk.
I guess on the last day on Earth, if I knew it as such, I would do something similar, but with a lighter heart probably.
5) Suzanne D. and her friend would call from California saying their flight back from Napa had been cancelled. They were laden with wine purchased on their tour and needed to figure a way to get back. They would eventually drive across the country (probably not the way they had hoped to do the Great American Road Trip) until flight stoppage was relaxed and they were in Oklahoma City. They came back home with various great wines after purchasing plastic sheeting and lots of tape, to strange looks from the Wal-Mart clerk, in Oklahoma. We would later have a wine tasting where I learned to adequately stick my snout in the glass to fully experience the wine, and how to awkwardly aerate the wine for full flavor.
6) I would worry about my friends in Chicago, who had moved there just a couple of months earlier. They were fine.
7) My British friend Robert, an atheist, would write telling me that his country felt for our country and was saying a prayer for us.
8) I remembered my time in high school when I went to the WTC and stood on the enclosed observation deck, scared to go any higher. I would think about how I would never go back there.
9) In subsequent days I would hear David Letterman say that such religious fundamentalism made absolutely no sense – drawing parallels in my mind to the conservative Christian rhetoric that had come to dominate U.S. public discourse at that time. I would watch more news reports where it seemed that the only good thing that had come out of this was that it had brought us all together as a nation. The crime rate dropped briefly. People met new neighbors. We weren’t afraid to cry.
10) One year after I would be in the midst of deciding whether to move to Vermont or stay in Atlanta. Kathy (of the getting home late on 9/11) would already be there. Robert (of the British prayers) would arrive for his, at the time, annual trip. We would go to the game with Suzanne (of the Napa wine excursion) et al. to the Atlanta Braves game. There were commemorative t-shirts, a video presentation, songs, and a moment of silence.
I’ve lost much contact with all of those people now. Tommy T. is gone. Robert no longer makes the annual trip although we talk. Kathy is happy in VT and we talk some. I asked Suzanne today to be my Facebook friend as she was responding to Kathy’s memories.
I don’t want to ever have to go through that day again, but I miss so many of those people. Sometimes I wish we could have the day after over and over, the good stuff, without the necessity of that really horrible day before.
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