Ten Years Ago
Posted By admin on September 11, 2011
The world was different.
No one had flown an airplane into buildings where innocent people were working. No one had watched people they loved die because airplanes had flown into towers and the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
Like many of our country’s citizens, our family lost someone we knew. He was my husband’s friend. He was kind to my children and to me. He should not have died that day. His name should not have appeared on the television screen on September 12th in a list of the victims.
On the morning of September 11th, I was walking to my office, balancing a cup of coffee. I was about 50 pages into Maggie’s Guardian, which was writing itself. I’ve never had a book before or since those 50 pages that wrote itself. We had a massive TV in the family room that my husband and his brother had bought the spring before to watch college basketball playoffs. The news was on. I used to leave it on so that the voices were background noise that reached into my office. I wasn’t even paying attention, but something in a man’s voice made me glance up from my coffee cup, to see this plane–I thought it was a Cessna–fly into a tower. I didn’t even realize it was the World Trade Center, which is weird, because since that day, I’ve recognized the towers in movies from Three Days of the Condor to Godspell.
I stopped with a single, dull-witted thought. That can’t be right.
For about five days, I was piled on the couch beneath my daughter’s favorite, TV-watching flowered comforter–terrified that if I moved away from the screen, some even more horrible thing would happen. Sometime that first day, our son, who was away from home, got through on the phone after who knows how many tries, to ask if “Pop,” who traveled quite a bit with his job, was flying. I knew our son was all right, so I hadn’t thought to call and tell him his pop was safe. Another friend, who was flying that day until they landed her plane half a country short of home, later had her ankle tattooed with her children’s and her husband’s names, in case she ever needed to be identified. At this moment, ten years later, that makes me cry.
That book stopped writing itself. I couldn’t imagine what good romance might be doing in the new world we lived in, but writing was my job, and I had a deadline. I finally wrenched myself away from the television screen and learned to write again. Oddly, I could never write in my office.
People say that they felt the same way after JFK was assassinated. I never needed to have a day that I will never forget. I never needed to feel so sad, or experience so much pointless, pointed hatred. If I could change one thing about the world, I would magically make everyone on earth suddenly realize that hatred has no place. I would make all the citizens of the earth want to fix problems by talking–even arguing, raging, without weapons–with those we consider our enemies–until we find a language that lets us exist together.
I wasn’t naive before September 11, 2001. I’m not since. But I want people to walk into their offices or onto a plane in the morning and go home that evening. I want all of us to survive in this world without hatred.
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