There is virtually no American over the age of 30 who doesn’t remember exactly what they were doing at the moment the world as we knew it stopped.
That Tuesday was a fine autumn day in most of the country. I was living in Santa Rosa, CA. My sister in Sebastopol called and said I must turn on the news. I did and screamed “Holy Shit!!” And I am sure I am not alone in that utterance.
If he had been home I am sure my late husband would have yelled too. But he had been 100 miles south in Half Moon Bay, preparing to pilot a small wooden fishing vessel up to Spud Point.
I called him and told him the news. He had just put out to sea. He thought I was joking. I am not a joker and certainly not about that.
When he got to the Golden Gate he saw all the big ships being turned back out beyond the 12 mile limit and suddenly understood.
What I remember most was the people jumping from the upper floors. An image I will never get out of my mind. It doesn't matter much where we were, personally, on that day, unless we were close by.
It is what we all witnessed that ties us together as citizens. We may have been doing laundry in Topeka or taking kids to school in Topanga, but we all ended up eyes glued to the screens.
And, in bars and cafes and in lines it was all we spoke of for many weeks after.
What is your strongest memory of that day? How did it change you? How do you think it changed our society? The echos are still reverberating…
Very nice, Annabel.
I was on a Delta flight that morning, headed east from Dallas to Jackson, Mississippi that day, beginning a business trip. It was clear weather, not a cloud between the plane and the ground. Then, about half way there - just over Shreveport, Louisiana, which I could see below us - the plane banked to the left and made a 180 degree turn back to the west. Someone - either one of the pilots or a flight attendant, I don’t remember which - made an announcement that we were returning to DFW Airport “due to an air traffic control situation in the East Coast.” But then I saw two of the flight attendants huddled together, crying, so I knew something terrible had happened. We didn’t find out what it was until we landed at DFW and everyone whipped out their cell phones. We all deplaned and left the airport as quickly as we could, in complete shock and disbelief. By then both towers had fallen.