|  Flossie
Arend
Managing Editor
Air Cargo News FlyingTypers
I remember waking
up on the morning of 9/11 and wishing I could go back to sleep. I was
a junior in college and had chosen to have early morning classes on Tuesdays
- a big mistake for me as I naturally kept night owl hours. My dorm apartment
was relatively quiet when I got out of bed, but I could hear the television
on in the living room; this was a normal occurrence as my actor student
roommates were always up early and put the television on while they had
breakfast and got ready for the day.
I remember walking in to the living room
and feeling as if I had walked into a museum. My roommates, coffees in
hand, were sitting and standing as still as statues, their eyes focused
on the television set. The first plane was hitting Tower 1 on a loop,
like some nightmarish broken record. It was probably about 8:55 in the
morning then.
I don't remember what we said to each other,
but they must have acknowledged my presence with something like, "A
plane hit the World Trade Center." I was frozen. I think I had the
opposite reaction from everyone else, at least from what I've read in
editing together FlyingTyper's 9/11 responses: my brain immediately
began buzzing with negative thoughts. A plane of that size would never
fly so low, so close to the city. Some instinctual part of me knew it
was terrible, and not an accident.
I stood with my roommates, watching as the
second plane hit Tower 2. I don't know what came over me then, but something
in me clicked on, like an automatic coffee drip. I picked up my things
and left my apartment to go to class. I don't know why I thought class
would still be going on, but I guess when something like that happens
- the kind of thing that attempts to tear through the fabric of a routine
life - the brain and the body struggle to operate normally. Like when
someone dies and we comb their hair just so, and fix their collar, and
wipe something from their cheek.
My morning class was all the way on the
other side of campus, across a large field. I had to pass through several
dorm apartments to get there. I remember that it was an absolutely gorgeous
day. A robin egg sky, a warm, yolky sun and very few clouds. The only
sound I could hear was the soft wind through the trees and the gossiping
birds. No one was outside. I was the only person still on schedule, walking
to a class that was surely canceled but walking anyway, I'm not sure why.
I distinctly remember taking a path between dorm apartment buildings and
seeing the blinds closed on all the windows, as if no one was willing
to let this day in - as if they could somehow keep it out. Every window
was flickering ghostly blue behind those blinds, the lit staccato coding
of television sets humming in dark rooms. That image will stay with me
always - the long, green path between buildings and those eerie, flashing
blue windows - my campus as a ghost town.
I reached the door of the building that
my classroom was in and it was locked, of course. There was no sign -
no time for signs, I guess. Looking back on it now, I suppose it is somewhat
ironic how determined I was to get to my Tuesday morning class - Self
Defense. Something unconscious was clearly at work there; I don't think
I have to explain it.
I got back to my dorm in time to see the
towers fall. I can't describe the feeling of watching something like that
happen in real time. We take for granted the landscape of life and the
world so that when the topography changes, it is a grim reminder of impermanence
- our own and our world's. Perhaps it was my youth, but I wasn't prepared
to see a piece of New York City crumble to ashes; I naively thought of
the buildings like bone in the body of the city, and a broken bone - a
tooth falling out - was unfathomable.
The days that followed were jumbled and
confusing. I didn't feel in them so much as outside of them, peering in.
My siblings were scattered all over the city, and I was only interested
that they were ok. My parents were meant to be in the Towers delivering
the Air Cargo News that day, and I am forever grateful that the stress
of a family business left them too tired to go in.
Everything changed that day. We became a
nation that didn't just look on horror, but experienced it as well.
For decades we had seen war come to others
and had seen how it ravaged and destroyed, but it had never come to us
like with the World Trade Center. Even Pearl Harbor had occurred within
some kind of pretext, however awful it was. I feel as if this was like
a shot to Achilles' heel - we were not some ambling God-nation that could
remain impenetrable and immortal. There were arrows that could take us
down. I only wish we had the foresight to see it earlier, to know that
we were, in fact, capable of crumbling, and that just because we had wealth
in our coffers did not mean we could be kept safely outside the realm
of the horrible. Money won't protect or save you - it might just put a
target on your back.
The idealist in me wishes we could have
gone in another direction somehow - one that didn't lead to fear, suspicion,
hate, racism, greed, war. It's been 10 years and we only just recently
took out Osama bin Laden. What do we have
to show for those ten years? How did we grow - not as a nation, but as
people who share a planet? I know I'm probably 1,000 times safer getting
on and off a plane now, but is life in general any safer? It seems we
are treating symptoms and not illnesses. How can we heal ourselves at
the source?
Some would say the hate and anger at the
root of all this is like the common cold - it can't be cured. They've
given up hope.
Why give away the one thing that can't be
taken?
Flossie Arend wrote this in 2011 reflecting on the 10th anniversary
of 911. |
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