Twenty Four

 

Twenty four years. Here's a little perspective. 1945 + 24 = 1969. I was born somewhere within that time. WW2 was never mentioned in our home. It was a thousand years ago and we were children who had better things to do. It was way back there, some mythical story. We had the British invasion, Rolling Stones, men on the moon, tv dinners to watch to a groovy new show, 'The Brady Bunch.'

And yet, I can remember the day, September 11, 2001, clearly. Twenty four years ago to this day.

I was on a back road, amongst cornfields, driving home from hicksville Indiana. I had just left the home of a man I thought I could have had a relationship with at one time. Leaving that day I knew it was over. He loved the familiarity of his home, the all in one gas station where you can buy gas, milk, and bait. Everyone waved and stopped to chat because they all knew your business. There was no movie theater, no restaurants, not even a bar to listen to some jukebox music. There was an abundance of cows and stars. Friendly people who talked about the weather and watching the corn grow was not for me, so I left that morning inside my thoughts. I turned on Mancow Muller's Morning Madness radio talk show coming from Chicago and headed north. It was a beautiful, clear day with absolutely no car or human other than myself as I listened to Muller and crew. At 8:46 am, the first plane hit the North tower in Manhattan. Muller and crew speculated how a plane could have veered off, at first thinking it might have been a small private plane. By then everyone had turned their televisions on to watch in real time. I listened to Mancow as they began to talk about other things and begin the clown show. Seventeen minutes later, our lives were changed forever. Disbelief had set in. Men had deliberately aimed two planes, which carried people to their last moments. Silence on the radio as I looked up to the sky and wished myself home. I was still on the road when the towers fell. I finally pulled into a gas station to use a payphone to call a relative, just to hear her voice. I remember people walking around in the station, no one speaking, as if we had been zapped with a powerful drug.

Watching people jump from the Towers to avoid the fire and seeing people run from the collapsing buildings was surreal. I watched as a reporter tried to describe what was happening but all she could do was wail in distress and curse the monsters who had done this. There are so many stories, so many people who were heroic that day. 

It's been 24 years. We've gone through a "great" recession, Katrina, the Iraq war, Obama, a pandemic, mass shootings and a president who is a convicted felon. 9/11 showed us how fallible we are. We wore a cloak of swagger and confidence which is now in ragged shreds and reveals who we are. We are going through some dark days in this country where we argue whether it's justifiable to murder a man with outrageous opinions with a long range rifle, where children are still being murdered in school, where women are still silenced and men make rules for them. I don't know where we are headed. I still hope we can salvage this wreak of a country and stop turning on each other. Twenty four years, thirty years, as long as I live, I will not forget.

*Image from WikiLeaks