Remembering 9/11

Sunday night as soon as the new broke on tv that Osama Ben Laden had been found and killed, the first thing I did was call my friend Nancy Hatch. “Nancy,” I said, “are you watching tv? Turn on your tv!” Nine years, seven months, and nineteen days ago, on that fateful September 11, 2001 morning, Nancy had called me. “Ellen, are you watching tv? Turn your tv on,” my friend had told me. And so I did, just in time to watch the second plane fly into the tower, just in time to watch the towers collapse. For the rest of the day and much of the night I sat mesmorized, compulsively switching from CNN to MSNBC to CBS to ABC, looking for someone to explain, to make sense of what seemed inexplicable. Now, all these years later, it suddenly seemed important that I once again share the experience with Nancy.

After I knew that Nancy's tv was on, as I curled up on the couch and waited for President Obama to speak, I found my mind wandering back to memories of that bright September morning. What did I remember? I remember Nancy calling when I was in the kitchen, sitting at the kitchen table working the Chicago Tribune crossword puzzle and watching Johanna eat breakfast. Steve was home, asleep in the basement. I was feeling unsettled in my life. We had recently moved Leslie to Chicago to start medical school at Northwestern, and, although she had been living away from home for the past four years while she attended the University of Illinois, we had still shared a zip code. We had also just moved Jill to Grinnell, Iowa, where she was a freshman at Grinnell College. Johanna had just started classes at Parkland College. And we were preparing to move Steve to Chicago where he was once more trying to figure out what to do with his life. My nest was emptying quickly. My world was changing.

I’m a born and bred Midwesterner. New York City was familiar to me mainly through television. In 2001 the only people I knew who even lived in New York were Karen Pickard’s sister and her family and Charles Bellafiore, the son of my next door neighbor. I knew that Karen’s sister lived on the Upper East side, and I was pretty sure that Charles wasn’t hanging around the World Trade Center. I had only been to New York twice in my life, but Sue Marshall and I had, on a long ago trip to see Broadway plays, eaten at Windows on the World on the top of the Trade Center and watched the amazing lights of New York from its wide windows. Sitting in my living room I remembered riding up in the incredibly fast elevators, the same elevators in which hundreds of people had been trapped.

I remember having this incredible need to know where everyone I loved was as I watched the tragedy unfold. I knew Jim was at work. I knew that Steve and Johanna were sitting with me, engrossed in what was happening. But I didn’t know where Jill and Leslie were. I couldn’t reach Leslie right away. I learned later that she was in fact sitting in class. When it became apparent that what was happening was bigger than just New York, that the Pentagon had also been hit, and that there was a rogue airplane heading somewhere, all I could think of was all the targets in Chicago, the Sears Tower, the Hancock Building. The Hancock Building which was only blocks from Leslie’s medical school.

Leslie called me before I hit full panic mode from the cell phone we had happily sent her off to school with. She was, she told me, sitting in class when her professor told everyone what had happened and told them to go home, that class was over for the day. She headed back to her dorm, found herself staring out the window at the Hancock Building with its metal beams that formed giant X’s all across the side. Her dorm, she told me, was not where she wanted to be, so she grabbed her roller blades and rollerbladed north along the lakefront to her boyfriend’s apartment along with thousands of other Chicagoans who were fleeing the central city.

Jill called right after Leslie and assured me that she was all right. I can still hear her telling me that there was nothing to worry about in Grinnell, that the tallest building on the whole campus was only three stories high.

That September morning I had never heard the name Osama Ben Laden. I had never heard the name Barak Obama. I had never thought of the words “Let’s Roll” as a battle cry. I had never heard the term weapon of mass destruction. I had never thought that an airplane could be a weapon of mass destruction. I had never heard of suicide bombers or underwear bombers or shoe bombers. I had never worried about the size of my shampoo bottle in my airplane carryon. I knew that long ago morning that my world was changing as my children were spreading their proverbial wings and leaving the nest. But I could not have imagined how much the rest of my world would change.

Leslie called me last Sunday night. “Is your tv on?” she asked, “Are you watching?”

I was watching. I have never stopped watching.