A few minutes ago I looked at the clock and the time was 9:11 p.m. on Sept 11, 2011. I have been pretty impervious to all the remembrancing going on, but I still indulged in a little what I was doing when.
I was driving to Neenah, Wisconsin when the planes hit, heard about it on the radio. I remember that at first all the commentators thought it was a small plane. I didn’t realize that it was passenger planes with people on them for several hours. I was doing a little consulting with the Neenah Public Library about what to do with some local history materials. We carried on pretty well, did our work, but by the time we went to lunch at a not very good Chinese place in a strip mall, with 3 TVs tuned to ground zero, it became clear that quitting early was the thing to do. I wanted to be home when my kids got back from school, or at least not too long after – John was a freshman in high school and Al was in 7th grade.
My mom was still alive, and living upstairs from me & John & Al in Madison. She cancelled a trip – she was going to go meet our Dutch friends, our host family during my Dad’s sabbatical – we lived in Holland from May to November of 1968 – at O’Hare. The de Wieds were on their way back to the Netherlands from the U.S., and my mom was going to take the bus down and spend the night at the airport Hilton, have dinner and drinks with them. The de Wieds ended up being among the travelers who spent a few days in Canada, instead. And, gosh, both my Dad and Dr de Wied have Wikipedia pages now.
I remember going walking with Rachael, talking about an Indian colleague, who hadn’t called Rachael or his daughter to check to see if they were OK after the attack, because A) both were far from NYC; and B) in his view, just under 3,000 dead was nothing compared to other disasters in India and around the World – just like Americans to carry on about a measly 3,000 killed.
I remember not being able to call John & Al’s Dad for days because even though he worked and lived in California, his cell phone was a Manhattan number – back when he was in the music biz.
I remember being appalled at my Midwestern friends who believed that because we are geographically far from new York City, the loss was not really ours.
I remember that my brother always writes something better about this day than I do.
