September 11 shouldn't be a Sunday. In my mind it's always a Tuesday, with me moving stuff around in the garage, answering the phone after shoving an old dishwasher into the corner, and hearing my mother-in-law ask me if I'm watching TV.
"No. Should I be?"
"Well, they've hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and ... well, it's really something you should see."
Who is "they"? And what should I do with the girls?
How awful that turning on the TV was actually something of a relief to me. Terrorists had clearly struck, but thankfully it wasn't on the global "paint your windows white" nuclear level I'd been expecting since I was a kid.
I didn't have to drag the girls into the basement, and that was something to be grateful for - for this parent/child, at least.
I was in England. I had gone to see a movie after exploring Canterbury all morning and when I left the theatre I saw, through a shop window, a line of TVs for sale, but each of them had an image of smoke rising from Godknewwhere and the words "Attack on America."
ReplyDeleteI walked around for an hour imagining some Stephen King "The Stand" scenario (partly because of alarmist news reports in fall '98, when the inspectors were pulled out of Iraq and everyone wanted to talk about how much VX gas it would take to kill everybody in the world and on Mars too). Then some kindly bar owner let me watch enough TV to ascertain that my parents and everybody I knew were probably not, yet, liquefied corpses. I banged my hand on the table and then walked around all night, confused; I was alone. The Brits were very nice. So were the French a couple days before when I'd been there, and we hadn't been attacked yet. So the heck with all the people who want to inculcate racism against Europe.