When I was a kid, watching black & white WWII movies on late afternoon Boston Movie Time, the war seemed like ancient history, impossibly distanced from my time. And yet when I was sitting there in 1961 watching, say, Purple Heart or Bataan, the war was only 16 years in the past. But when you’re a kid, 16 years is more than a lifetime. When you’re on the other end of the life spectrum, 16 years ago is the blink of an eye.
And, so – blink,blink – how can it be that it’s been 16 years since those planes plowed into the Twin Towers, into the Pentagon, into that field in Pennsylvania.
I was in Orlando on business, at a Gartner Group event, when the attacks occurred.
I remember shaking my head in disbelief as I watched the Towers topple.
I remember making phone calls and checking emails, one eye on the hotel room TV, another on some online news site, and then comparing notes, information, misinformation, with everyone else who was gleaning things from TV and the Internet, and from brief exchanges with friends and family who were gleaning their things from TV and the Internet.
It was all so unfathomable.
All that any of us wanted was to leave that Gartner conference – who cared about technology in the Internet Age, or whatever the macro-topic was? – and get home. Fortunately, I was able to get a train north from Orlando the next day and wend my way up the East coast.
The most sobering and stunning thing I’ve ever seen in my life was the black cloud, extending the length of Manhattan, that we could see from the train windows as we exited Newark and headed into The City.
Like most everyone else, I had trouble sleeping for a while, sitting up in bed and – quite literally – shaking my head to get the picture of the plane hitting one of the WTC Towers out of it.
Like most everyone else, I read those brief life stories of the victims that The New York TImes ran, tearing up as I read about thousands of people I had never met but whom, 250 words later, I somehow knew. (And were those 343 NYFD firefighters as uniformly good-looking as I remember them?)
16 years. Passed in the blink of an eye.(67 years passed in the blink of an eye as well.) On September 11, 2001, my niece Molly was a few months from her fifth birthday. When she asked my sister why she was crying, Trish told her that something bad had happened to her town. (Trish had lived in NYC for a number of years.) Molly asked, “Is it my town, too?” Answer: Yes.
In November, Molly will turn 21. Blink of an eye…
It was nine months after 9/11 before I got back to NYC, a town I have always loved. (My town, too.) We walked around lower Manhattan, where the lost-loved-one signs were still much in evidence, pinned to fences, glued to walls.
A few months before my husband died, we visited the 9/11 memorial site. The museum was not yet open, but the reflecting pool was. Even though we had tickets for an assigned time, there was a long wait. It was September. Sunny. Hot. My husband had just finished up a chemo cycle. Jim had no patience with waiting in line when he was healthy, let alone when he was so sick. We made our way out, and a ticket-taker asked why were leaving. I explained our situation, and she brought us in through the secret passage. So we got to make our visit and pay our respects. New York City was definitely Jim’s town, too. He wanted to retire there. That was four year years ago. In a few short months, in February 2014, Jim died. Blink of an eye.
September 11th is just one of those days when you’ll always remember where and when. And what it did (or didn’t) mean to you.
I can watch the films now - the planes running into the sides of the buildings, the buildings collapsing – without shaking my head in disbelief.
Not that there aren’t plenty of times when I find myself shking my head in disbelief when I think about September 11th. But the disbelief is around just how fast these last 16 years have gone by.
Blink of an eye.
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Here’s a prior episode of Pink Slip 9/11.
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