September 11, before 2001, was a day like many others. A perfectly ordinary day. Nothing really spectacular about it.
Except, for my parents, for one year. 1981. After a year and a half of trying (and one miscarriage), September 11, 1981 was my due date.
My father’s family has a history when it comes to first-born children. They’re all born late. My mother knew this but thought she’d be different for some reason.
So there they were in early January with a child due September 11, 1981. Nobody thought anything of it. Days came and went, my mother went from being very skinny to not so skinny to “She’s either pregnant or smuggling bowling balls to and from … everywhere.” Things went pretty much as expected.
September 11, 1981, came and went. My mother was still very pregnant, but for whatever reason I was churning along just fine and saw no reason to leave the cozy, wet confines of her uterus.
Then September 18 came … one full week after her due date. She’d started eating spicy, oily food—she’d been told that it would help convince me to come out sooner or something. Hey, I didn’t care. It was variety in my diet, which I probably wouldn’t see much of after that for the next … several years (we were poor when I was born. Like, damn poor. Cheese was a luxury).
September 25 came … two full weeks after the doctor had initially predicted I’d been born. I still failed to see justification for leaving her uterus (don’t you just love how I’m attaching any semblance of personal reason to this? In reality I haven’t the smallest clue. I mean, none). My parents were talking to me in-utero (this would not be the first time I heard voices. At least this time I didn’t have to go on any anti-psychotics), telling me they wanted to see me, they wanted me to be not horribly late, etc. If I’d been able to speak, I think I would have said “I will.” That might be the only time they wouldn’t have been pissed off at me for saying that.
October 2 came … three full weeks after my parents had been anticipating my birth for … a while now. By this point they were getting kinda nervous, antsy … my mother was probably getting tired of lugging this ungrateful kid around…why couldn’t I be like all the other kids who weren’t three weeks past due? This would be the first of many times they might wish I was like other kids. Oh, and how.
Well, we can’t wait it out too long now … they might just say ‘screw this kid, let’s go get re-pregnant and we’ll just wait another 9 months’. Well, no. They wouldn’t have done that. I don’t think my mother would have gone for it.
At any rate, two days later they had their bouncing, healthy baby boy … sort of. Oh, they had me in spades. But I wasn’t really bouncing and I wasn’t exactly healthy. Swallowing amniotic fluid will do that to a baby, you know. I can’t count the number of times I’ve forgotten that particular aspect of my birth … seems like every time I remember “amniotic fluid” I’ve forgotten what exactly happened to me and how dangerous it was.
On September 11, 2001, I was not thinking about the 20th anniversary of my due date. I wasn’t thinking about anything when my mother’s call woke me up at about 9 AM.
My mother has worked in DC since 1984. And despite the fact that I’ve seen tons of maps of the place and been there so many times that it’s become boring and commonplace, I have never quite gotten the geography of the place down. That was the case that morning when she told me that the destruction wasn’t limited to the WTC towers. The Pentagon had already been hit.
I suppose on another morning if she’d told me there was a random wastebasket fire at the Pentagon I would have said something like “Well that’s far away from you, so even if it spread by some random luck you’d still be fine.” But I couldn’t recall anything about DC geography other than “Southeast is a dangerous neighborhood”. I didn’t think to ask her how close she was. She didn’t think to tell me how close she wasn’t because there was no need, from her POV. She didn’t know my sense of DC geography is horrible and I didn’t think to tell her.
For the next few hours I sat talking to her and my sister via AIM. My sister was in Indiana at the time (school) and wasn’t going much of anywhere. I took a ten minute break from the computer lab I’d been in to to swim through the morass of people gathered on my way to my film class. It would be poignant, I suppose, to say that the sound level was either very high or very low … but from everything I remember, it was what you’d expect from a group of people gathered very closely watching the television. I’ve heard more noise from Monday Night Football. People were talking some … not much, but some. I think more than anything else, one of two things was true of everyone in the general vicinity of the televisions and radios out: either they wanted to be there to find out if anything else happened or they wanted to be there in case names of the deceased started flashing across the screen.
As I was making my way to class I ran across the prof of the class. I remember asking her, somewhat jokingly, if she thought there was half a chance that anyone who showed up would have the slightest interest in talking about film history given the day’s events.
It must have been a difficult decision for her … certainly none of us could really have prepared for an event of this magnitude. In a way this was much, much bigger than a close relative dying. If you had any friends or family in the general NYC area you were at the mercy of the news media. Totally, completely, utterly at their mercy. They had already been saying that the phone lines in the area were a shambles from so many people trying to get a signal out with their cell phones.
You could have made a case philosophically for the need to keep some sort of constant, some control in one’s life to maintain a sense of normalcy that day. Philosophically, you’d have had a point. But … I think a lot of us needed to be held and told what was going on … to be told that things were going to be okay (and it would have been not much more than words … when big-ass towers fall after planes hit them, things do not look as though they will be okay). We relied on CNN and Fox News and MSNBC and anyone who had footage or anything like that.
She knew that. Above whatever issue of normalcy, she knew that what we all needed was to be able to make our own decision that day. “Due to the … events today, if people don’t really want to talk about film history, that’s fine. If you want to I’m happy to stay here and discuss it … but if you want to go somewhere else and do whatever, that’s fine.”
Nobody wanted to discuss film history. I guess a few of us could have talked about it but we would have been talking about it and our minds would have been somewhere else entirely.
So we left class and I went back to the television for a bit, just to make sure nothing further had happened. Ha. Make sure. Like I had some idea, some concrete notion that nothing else would have happened. “Oh, it’s all over now. Planes are done flying into buildings, towers are done crashing to the ground…”
No more planes had flown into buildings. The four sites (three if you count the WTC as one) had not grown in number.
Four was still several more than anyone (but for a few) had anticipated, planned for, etc.
My control, my normalcy, was not the television. I think for a few hours that day my sister and I … held on to each other. Unless we had to (class, bathroom, etc), we didn’t get up, didn’t go do anything else. We stayed and talked.
And for good reason.
My mother had signed off AIM without a word.
Remember now … my sense of DC geography was shot. My sister had no idea what was happening to our mother. She’d been online for a few hours and then “[mother’s SN] signed off at …” about 11 AM.
I recall (perhaps falsely) my sister calling home. I don’t remember what she said was the result of that call.
What I do remember was sitting in that lab for the next two hours waiting for … something. Anything.
The commute from my mother’s office to our house normally takes … 45 minutes? She leaves at 4:15 and usually gets home around 5.
It took two hours. From about 11 AM to about 1 PM she was between her office and our house. And I didn’t know where the hell she was and my sister didn’t. I didn’t know if anything had happened to her office building. I was loading the SDMB thread frantically; due to recent work done on it, it wasn’t taking the normal half-hour to load a single thread. It was taking a minute, maybe two.
I remember being a mixture of frightened … utterly distraught … furious that day. I remember posting something like “I swear if they get my mommy…” and not being able to finish that sentence … or maybe not wanting to. I kept reading updates from that thread hoping to see something about DC. If the news was bad I wanted to know as soon as possible.
It was all we could do to focus on something … to hold onto it as tightly as we might need. On any given day there are several threads in any forum that are just flying, people are posting to them so fast.
I don’t recall many that were getting as many views or replies as that one. Updates were coming fast and furious from anyone who was watching the news. The same thing would be posted for or five times. The more you saw it the more you were able to deal with it, I think. It was a very peculiar sense … I was reading and posting to this thread, and I was in a suburb of DC. People in Ireland, in England, in California, in countries all over the world were reading this, posting to it … we were all connected by a thread running on a server in a Chicago newspaper building. It’s a surreal thought to me given the dichotomy of “thread” as in something very thin and “thread” as an online discussion. We hung by a thread, but it was in no danger of breaking.
Then she signed back on. I remember lambasting her (with love as much as anger) for not letting us know where she was going. It hadn’t occurred to her to tell us she was going home.
My mother was safe.
A lot of others—too many others—were not.
So there you have it. For the better part of most Americans (and more than a few people in other countries), September 11 is a day that has little, if anything, to do with something other than WTC towers falling, other than the Pentagon with a gaping hole, other than a few in a plane in Pennsylvania airspace thwarting a few others in that same plane. For a few, it bears twofold meaning.