Of course I remember where I was.
I was working as a receptionist/office assistant for an architecture and engineering firm. I took a call from Noreen, wife of Bill, our landscape architect.
"I'm watching the Today show, and a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center" she said.
My mind created an image: a single engine private plane, a pilot who was obviously inept or had had a medical emergency. I transferred Noreen to her husband's line and went into the copy room to make duplicate sets of blueprints.
Some of my coworkers had radios on, and within moments music was interrupted by news alerts. This was bigger than one person and one plane.
When a second plane hit the other tower, I ran to a computer to try to find more information online. I couldn't get online. Too many people were doing the same thing as me.
I felt the frozen fear that grips you when you know you're going to be in a car accident and all you can do is watch it happen.
Everyone stopped working and gathered around the office radios. Not being able to see the escalating destruction, only getting a vision of it from the news announcer's hushed, deliberately steady tone, was chilling. He announced the collapse of the first tower without changing his tone. Minutes later he said, "And now the second tower is going down." Then, for a long moment, he said nothing at all.
Two of our coworkers went across the street to the cable office, where there were televisions. They came back quiet and stunned. "It's even worse than it sounds," one said.
I'd been blissfully asleep and didn't know it until I woke up on 9/11. I paid little attention to the news in those days. To me, other countries' hostilities toward the U.S. meant angry, shouting mobs burning American flags in faraway lands. I could never have imagined such hatred manifested against my country, couldn't have conceived of men willing to give their lives in order to punish thousands of their fellow human beings for the crime of being American.
In the days that followed 9/11, as I tried to shape a perspective to fit the incomprehensible, what I kept returning to was how everyone had been having an ordinary Tuesday. Ordinary people arriving at work, saying good morning, filling their coffee cups, settling down at their desks. Like me, like millions of other people that day. Men, women and children settled into their airplane seats, thinking about where they'd been or where they were going. Every last one of them ordinary, unique, irreplaceable. Someone's mother, father, daughter, son, best friend.
Ten years later, I saw footage of the second plane hitting the tower and I burst into tears. I believe most of us, if not all of us, carry a scar from that day that will never quite heal, and a certain memory or image awakens that day for us all over again.
When I mentioned the anniversary to my older daughter, she brought up the fact that other countries suffer incalculable losses as a rule rather than an exception. I've heard and read that from others, too. Who are we to act so wounded when other countries suffer so much more than we do, seems to be the sentiment.
Who we are is ordinary people who were unprepared for violent acts of such magnitude. If we were naive, well, that doesn't make it any less painful. Tell the children growing up without their father that their loss pales in comparison to children in other countries. Tell the sobbing parents and spouses to suck it up and take the larger world view.
You can't. You wouldn't do it to the citizens of the perpetually war-torn countries, either. Loss is loss. Sorrow isn't the exclusive privilege of the long suffering.
I'm no longer oblivious to politics or terrorism. And I'm not oblivious to the suffering of people on foreign soil. But today belongs to ten years ago, the people lost, and the people left behind. They're who I'm thinking of, who I'm praying for, and who I'm crying for.
