Remembering 9/11

It was one of those moments when you automatically knew you would always remember the day it happened and what you were doing when you heard. The Challenger Disaster was the first experience I'd had with this in my life (we were in Sr. John's 3rd grade class listening to the launch on the radio... yep, I'm that old!), but we all knew right away that this was huge. Here are my memories of that day...

I was working in Admissions at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. Over the summer, we'd had a tropical storm, which flooded caused a "high water incident" in Texas Medical Center and destroyed the Admissions Office. After several moves, we took up residence in a cubbyhole office in the Department of Internal Medicine. That's where I was when my co-worker's boyfriend called and said that "something bad was happening" and we should find a TV. We did find one down the hall and got there just in time to see the first tower collapse.

I returned to my office and called my mom, who hadn't heard anything yet. My youngest brother was in the 82nd Airborne Division & they were on field alert status, which means they had to be ready to ship out within 24 hours (or something like that - sorry if I have that wrong, Kev!). My mom was immediately panicking saying, "He's gone, he's gone. They've already gone, I'm sure." It seems funny now - 2 deployments later - that the idea of his deploying was so terrifying. But it was.

By the afternoon, all of the "non-essential" (basically non-medical) people in the Medical Center were being sent home. Probably because no one was really interested in working anyway. I remember riding the bus home & seeing all of the emergency vehicles stationed in the Med Center... just in case.

DKG (who was home because he'd had a bad needle stick the day before and had to get HIV testing & preemptive HIV meds) and I watched the news in my apartment in Houston for the rest of the day. There was lots of concern in the news about whether or not Houston would be attacked, as I'm sure there was everywhere else. They were worried about the oil refineries being terrorist targets and there were people evacuating the city. The shock, fear and grief was overwhelming. I remember thinking that nothing would ever be the same, that some previously unacknowledged sense of safety and security was gone forever.

There's a passage from Rilla of Ingleside (one of the Anne of Green Gables novels) I thought of immediately...

In March of the year of grace 1918 there was one week into which must have crowded more of searing human agony than any seven days had ever held before in the history of the world. And in that week there was one day when all of humanity seemed nailed to the cross; on that day the whole planet must have been agroan with universal convulsion; everywhere the hearts of men were failing them for fear.

What were you doing on September 11, 2001?