Five years ago I had overslept and I was lying in bed, listening to Gary do his usual morning rant. Well, not listening. What I truly was listening to was NPR. I had heard the tone change, and the morning broadcaster seemed to be breaking form. Some woman on the phone was describing smoke billowing out of a building.
“Gary, are you listening to this?”
At the time it was only one plane, I believe, but we vaulted out of bed looking for images. I took the TV by the treadmill, and Gary manned the big TV in the living room. “I’ve got CNN,” I said, and Gary moments later called back and said “FOX says it’s two planes.”
“FOX lies,” I called out. (This was collaborated repeatedly that morning every time Edie Somebody said, “We don’t want to report rumors BUT.”)
“No, there’s a picture. It was two planes.”
“It’s that crazy Osama guy who has the vendetta against that building,” I called back. I knew about him because when Eric Rudolph was on the run I thought I should know what he looked like, and I was surprised to see this Osama guy was Number One Most Wanted for the earlier WTC bombing, not Eric.
We called updates to each other until CNN scooped FOX with the “Smoke at the Pentagon” crawl. That was terrifying, so I joined Gary in the other room and he converted my fear to anger with his rant, which was now focused on the way the attack was described as “sophisticated.” Add to that our anger that they had now attacked the government, instead of a skyscraper that seemed to personally piss them off. We pulled chairs directly in front of big TV, switched it to CNN, and worshiped at the altar of Breaking News.
I didn’t feel like it was in a movie at all. It seemed very real. It doesn’t seem real now; that’s why I keep watching these replays. One unreal moment was when the first tower went down. I think I was calling work at the time, promising to come in when they stopped blowing stuff up. I turned back to the TV and they said a tower had come down. “No, it hasn’t,” I thought. “There’s just a bunch of smoke there. They just can’t see the tower behind all that smoke. This is CNN? Now CNN is reporting rumors.”
When the second tower came down, I fell a little in love with Aaron Brown for saying there “are no words.” I soothed my nausea over seeing what I thought was 5,000 people die with a home-cooked brunch of, well, cholesterol. Bacon, eggs fried in bacon grease, and fried hash browns. With cheese. Because life is short.
Mine was one of the patriotic houses that flew the flag that night. Only, the flag wasn’t there out of patriotism. I planted the flag in the front yard that night to say, “Shit. That scared me.”
4 responses to “Where I Was”
Well put, I could not have stated it better myself. “Shit, That scared me” too. I used to work between StL and a town just outside of there and the first thing I remember was trying to find out where the flights were coming from/going to and that could’ve been me and thankfully it was my off week, my week at home. My immediate co-workers were all safe, but most of the ones up there lost family and friends that day. You said it perfect. “Shit. That scared me.”
Hi, Sheila E. I was debating between that and “F*ck, that scared me,” but my mom reads this blog.I’m glad you and yours were safe.
This happened at the height of Page construction, so I was still crawling along 94 up to 70 when it happened. I remember when KTRS reported a second plane had hit, I thought to myself, “Who at traffic control is fucking up the flight paths so badly?” Yeah, I was naive enough to not even consider the possibility it was deliberate.By the time I got to work at the cable company, it was clear what had happened. We spent the entire day glued to TVs – they’re conveniently abundant in the TV industry – and stood there crying as the towers fell.
I got to hear it from Brian P_____t, AKA Mr. Know-It-All or Professor Marvel or Commander McBragg. Apart from the sentiment “F*ck, that scared me!” I was rather pissed that Enterprise didn’t have more bandwidth so I could see what was happening. That was a productive day.