Today is the 10th anniversary of one of the big historical events that have occurred within my lifetime. My flag is flying in the yard in respect of the occasion. Ten years ago was a personal big event for us: Jerry and I had decided to make a live together, and he had quit his job in southern California. Just that weekend, he had hauled his last trailer of stuff to Renton, WA, and it was the beginning of his retirement. I still had to get up and go to work. We were having breakfast when the phone rang. It was Brook--"Turn on your TV!" he commanded. We did, and watched the airplanes that crashed into the World Train Center, and heard the news about crashes at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, PA, only a few miles from where Jerry had spent some of his teenage time, and where his father Frank Horn had grown up. Jerry said to me, "Your life has just changed," and he wasn't talking about our newly formed household. I am most astonished at the ignorance of those who attacked us. What was their intent, to defeat us or just to scare us? Do they not realize what a big country we are, and how protective we are of our nation? After I visited Mt. Rushmore and was driving home from Montana, I knew that those plains and hills that I drove through would never be surrendered out of threats or fear. Guys and gals on horses, with rifles, would still hold our land, and they had counterparts in every state. Which may say something about the hill tribes in Afghanistan.
I have other "biggies." I remember sputnik, and President Kennedy's assassination, and Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. I remember the deaths of Marilyn, and Elvis, and the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. And there are a hundred other memories of social, political and cultural change within this one, short, 64 span of lifetime. But September 11 remains a "biggie."
This is a blog. That means that you can comment. Please reply, and tell me where you were that day, and the other events that are the hallmarks that place you in our history.
I remember calling you that day to say turn on your T.V. I remember first hearing about it on NPR news that was playing on my radio alarm. When they announced that a jet crashed into one of the twin towers, I instantly realized that it was a terrorist attack. And I also had a sense, as did Jerry, that "things would be different from now".
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I was waiting in my mom's car to be taken to zero-hour jazz band. I heard it on the radio and knew that it was big but couldn't really process what it meant, though I did get out of the car and walk back in the house to tell someone. We didn't play any music in jazz band that morning, we just sat and listened to the radio. They wheeled a TV out to the student commons so we could keep posted throughout the day. From Alaska, I remember thinking New York really seemed like a foreign country that week - it was all a bit surreal.
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