Ten Years Ago

Growing up I always heard that everyone remembered exactly where they were when they heard that JFK had been shot. That made sense in some clinical way but I didn't really understand it in my gut until 9/11. Ever since that terrible day we've traded stories of how we heard. For those of us outside of the actual danger zones, this is our real connection. This is my story.

Every morning I would drive from St Paul to Minneapolis for work. My job was downtown but I hated parking down there so I would leave my car by our old apartment and walk in. As I was parking there were preliminary reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center. They didn't know if was terrorism or a pilot gone off course. I mentally filed it under 'strange things' and walked the nearly two miles to work.
Once downtown I ducked into the skyway system. When I walked through Gaviidae Common I noticed that people were lined up around the atrium railing. Everyone was watching the giant TV. On it was a WTC tower, big gash in it and smoke pouring out. I cruised through so I still didn't know what was happening.
Up to my office and I stopped to say hi to the receptionist. I asked her if she'd heard that a plane hit the WTC and she told me that another plane had hit the other one. That is when it became clear that an attack was under way. (If you read a bunch of these remembrances, most of them will make this point. There is no way to convey the shock of that second plane to someone who didn't go through it all. Even now, seeing the video again it strikes at you. At your sensibilities. How monstrous and unexpected!)
I went to my desk and the phone lines were out of control. Logged into my computer and I couldn't get the internet to show up for places like CNN or other news sites. My email told me that they had shut down air traffic for the New York area and soon after the whole east coast and then the whole country.
We got all of our news from the callers after that. They told me that the pentagon had been hit. They told me that the one tower and then the other had collapsed. They told me that there were other planes that wouldn't respond to radio. I didn't know what to believe, none of us did. We passed around information in the call center.
My office was on the 20-something floor of one of the tallest buildings in downtown Minneapolis. We didn't know what was happening except that we knew some tall buildings were getting hit. Around 10a or so we found out they were evacuating the place. (Ten years later this sounds absurd but no one knew what was going on then.)
I'll never forget the walk home that day. The skies were quiet and empty. We see so many planes in the air here that the noise is part of our daily wallpaper. They were gone now and it was eerie. Part of me expected to see one scream out of nowhere and cream the downtown area. (Again absurd now, but we just didn't know!)
When I got home I called Hans and went over to his place. We watched footage together for a few hours. I remember them trying to piece together who could have done such a thing. I remember watching new videos of the destruction, especially the tower collapses.

The next few days at work were tough, of course. We did some searches to see if any of our clients were on the planes. I don't remember the results but just the act itself was demoralizing. None of the planes were flying and we didn't really know when they would. We helped people rent cars where they weren't sold out. Frankly, there was little we could do.
I remember one group that actually bought a car in Seattle and drove it back to the cities. I remember hearing stories of people stuck in hotels far from home and really unable to go anywhere. I very clearly remember one man who drove from San Diego to Boston because his son's birthday was that Friday.
Then the planes flew again and to our surprise it wasn't all that snarled up.

It feels like I should leave some bit of wisdom, something certain that I've learned over the last ten years but frankly my pundit hat isn't fitting well this morning. I can only say that we were together then as a country in a way that I've never seen before (and probably never will again). Frankly, if it takes horror like that, then I'd rather we just keep up our other fights. Thousands dead isn't worth a few weeks off from political fighting.
This will be a story that we tell our kids about. Probably at some point they will have a moment like this of their own. Almost certainly will, if history is a guide. Maybe the best we can tell them is that time passes. Even when it seems like the world is over, it really isn't. Tomorrow will come again and again.