September 11, 2001 was a beautiful day. I mean, one of those for-the-books, this-is-why-we-live-in-New-England kind of days. Just warm enough to remind you it wasn’t yet officially fall, but cool enough to tell you it was definitely September. The skies were insanely blue, nary a cloud. Unusually, that blue, cloudless sky was damned near nationwide that day. The entire country was enjoying a perfect late summer, early fall day. It couldn’t have been a better day for flying. For anything.
We were living in Marshfield, MA, in our house overlooking the South River, the marsh, then the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Our girls were little. The twins were still too young to be in any kind of school, but Leigh was in the insanely charming little neighborhood pre-school we had just a 2 minute drive from the house. I dropped her at 8:50. I had just heard on the radio on the way over that there had been some kind of accident at World Trade down in New York.
Oh did I mention it was our 8th wedding anniversary? Yeah. As Mike says, “We have no excuse to not remember it now.”
Anyway, when I was depositing Leigh with her teacher I asked if she’d heard about World Trade. She said she hadn’t, being as she was, understandably busy preparing for her charges. But by the time I walked back to the car, the other mothers who’d shown up right after me were talking about it. One of them had a friend married to an American Airlines pilot and evidently this woman was now trying to reach her husband. Of course she wanted to know he was alright, but also to ask him if he saw what happened. He was scheduled to fly to New York from Boston that day. The second plane hadn’t yet hit, so the “small plane” theory was still very much alive and there was much confusion about how such a thing could have happened on such a clear, cloudless, beautiful day.
Then suddenly there was no confusion. By the time I got home, we knew.
Just moments after 9am, the second plane hit, and everyone knew, without being told by anyone, that we were under attack.
And then everything changed.
When Mike got home from work that day we decided to take the girls to the beach to fly kites. All I kept thinking was how the terrorists were children once too. With a mother who loved them (presumably). How — HOW — do you go from childhood innocence to piloting a jet liner into the side of a building?
It was all I could think about. What went wrong in their lives that led them to this point. What kind of culture could produce that kind of human. I knew, instinctively, without yet knowing very much about Islam, that these men were inculcated more by their culture than they were by their specific mothers. That this wasn’t a normal, Western failure of motherhood. It was a cultural infection that traveled through their mothers to them.
And as I watched my children play, I knew that that morning, everything changed for them. For all of us. We just didn’t know what that would look like yet, what with DHS, TSA, the surveillance state, etc.
But I knew for sure there was the America we had before the attacks, and that there would be the America after. We just didn’t know the contours of it yet.
Oh, it turns out the woman’s husband did, indeed see what happened, but that wasn’t known until much later. He saw the first plane hit. He must have known right away something was terribly, terribly wrong. Fully loaded cross-country airplanes don’t just fly into skyscrapers. It simply didn’t happen.
Until it does.
And we all remember, 25 years ago, today.