Remembering 9/11

[wraithfodder]

I had meant to post this last night, but it took me an hour of scouring the hard drive to find the photo...


This was the 'cross' of steel left after the attacks. I took this picture in September 2006. I went back to the site this past July and it's just a construction site now. I couldn't see anything to identify it as the site of the attacks...

I was at work, turned on the internet to surf the web briefly before starting work, and suddenly there was a photo on the Yahoo news page, of one of the towers with a hole in it. I remember thinking... how the hell could somebody fly a Cessna into a building THAT big? News was very sketchy and then more stuff started appearing on the web. Since I had AOL at work (it wasn't considered 'evil' back in those days) I IMed a friend who lived in the city. She told me what was happening. Then she told me the tower was gone. It just disappeared. She literally lived her entire life in the shadow of the towers and now it just crumbled into dust. I emailed a friend who worked in the city, only to get back a grim "fatal error" email notice. Fortunately she had been running late for work that day so wasn' ti nthe tower. Then someone came running down the hall saying that Washington DC had been attacked and my mind was going "world war III." Since it was chaos, I left, went home (lived very close) and oddly enough, popped tapes into both VCRS and chose CNN and CBS (which was the only station now remaining, as it was the only station with a spare antennae on the Empire State Building - the rest went down with the towers).


I never knew this existed until this summer when I took this photo. It's eerily stunning, and the remains of a sycamore tree root - The Trinity Root - details at www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp, but then I haven't gotten much into the city in recent years.

Now, when 9/11 comes around, oddly enough, I collect the NY Times and some other NY papers and stuff them in a box along with the original papers, and one day, I'll take a look at them and see how the world has changed. Alas, not for the better.

And there are more people's comment s on this topic at http://www.livejournal.com/misc/latestqotd.bml?qid=537

Comments

[clight000.livejournal.com]

I remembered that day so clearly, right down to what I was wearing. Strange really. My story is, we had just eaten dinner, my sister, my mom and I, and my dad calls us from China, where he was on a work trip. My mom answers and at first her voice gets really paniced and she just says: "What?! Terrorist? Over there??!!" Then I remember my heart jumping into my throat cuz all I could think of was DAD. But my mom quickly got what was going on and turned on CNN (aah, the wonders of satellite), and by then I had calmed down, knowing my dad was ok. Apparently all he had said, without even a hello, was "Are you watching the news??" and after that all my mom had heard was "Terrorist, plane hijacked, and hit the tower."

We watched for a few minutes, trying to figure out what was going on, and the 2nd plane hit.

The rest of the evening I just remember sitting in front of the TV watching the same clips over and over again on CNN, and my cousins came over, and I remember calling my best friend to tell her, she hadn't heard anything and thought I was making some kind of sick joke.

I remember that day very clearly, probably because it is forever branded into my head, that feeling that I had when I heard my mom all paniced, thinking something had happened to my dad. And knowing so many people had that same feeling that day, but unlike for me, for them there was no moment of relief.

[wraithfodder.livejournal.com]

I think days like this are always forever remembered. I remember when JFK got shot, we landed on the moon... although I honestly can't remember what I was wearing, but can remember where I was when I heard the news, and which way I was facing.