such a sad day

So unless you have spent the last 6 years under a rock, you know that today is the anniversary of the terrorist attack on the US. I was thinking about where I was when it happened.

I was working full-time, outside of the home in a major city not terribly far from NYC. My husband and I both worked at large, neighboring universities. My coworker and best work friend, Mel, was on vacation and called me to ask if I knew what was going on. She just saw a plane fly into one of the towers on tv. Since I was working somewhere with no radio, and no tv, we were dependent on the internet, and it was EXTREMELY slow getting to any news websites. She was our connection to the outside world, so her time on the phone with me was precious. She was the one who told me about the second plane, that the towers collapsed, about flight 93, and about the pentagon.

When I got off the phone with her, I tried to call my husband to see how we were going to get home. He and I took public transit (trains) and they were all shut down. The phones were all down, and I was panicked. I had no idea how I would find him in this chaos. Somehow he managed to get through to me. He had found a coworker who lived out our way and who had an SUV. We packed as many people in as we could, and had to stay off the highways since every major road was having a huge traffic jam.

When we got home, we tried to find something light to watch on tv, but of course, there was nothing. All we could watch was the same stuff over and over. We went outside for awhile, but our neighborhood, which is normally full of kids playing outside, was dead silent. All we could hear were the birds singing, which seemed eerie given the circumstances. In the end, we pulled out a dvd and watched "Pat and Mike," and I made spaghetti for dinner (I remember that specifically because I was kind of hoping for a carbohydrate coma.)

The thing that made the whole thing feel so close to home for me was that I used to have a recurrent nightmare that I was standing on the street, and I watched an airplane crash into a glass skyscraper. I would have this dream over and over, and I'd wake up shaking, soaked in sweat.

Ironically, I never had that dream again after 9-11.