It feels a bit bittersweet that given how chaotic and busy this year's been - so many other things to report on today - that this year's remembrance of September 11th seems less important than other years.
For all the chest-thumping and flag-waving over December 7th - the attack on Pearl Harbor - it too fell in importance as the generations most affected by it aged away, leaving behind the echoes of sorrow and fear that reverberated that day.
For all the rehashings of November 22nd - the assassination of JFK - it too is fading into legend, the constant re-enactments of phantom riflemen hiding at the Grassy Knoll turning into punchline rather than serious debate over what really happened that day.
As someone who can still remember vividly what it was like that Tuesday: Being at Main Library in downtown Ft. Lauderdale, running into my former supervisor Barbara tearfully telling me about the second tower getting hit, watching the first tower fall on a snowy-screened television with poor reception, telling a young couple why the county government center was closed and that "one of the towers is just flat out gone," returning to Northwest Regional in Coral Springs where it was the quietest I had ever heard that place, going to a blood donation center in Lauderhill and waiting well into darkness with the long queue of people in the parking lot wanting to do something in that moment...
And time moves on, children grow up, there is a generation going into college now born well after that tragic day.
It's getting harder to remember.
1 comment:
The thing I remember the most about it is the BART ride to work that morning. That's when I found out that something had happened. The train kept stopping in the dark tunnel between stations with cryptic announcements over the intercom, one of which said that we would not be stopping at Civic Center, and that if you needed to get off there, ride to the next station and there would be a shuttle bus back to it. There had apparently been some concern over city hall being a target, so BART wasn't taking any chances stopping that close to it, and that train blazed through Civic Center Station doing at least sixty, maybe seventy miles per hour. It was pandemonium at the next station with all of those downtown SF commuters thrown off of their routines trying to get to work, and that's where I overheard someone saying "...crashed into the World Trade Center..."
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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