Where were you when...

Each generation, I suppose, has at least one iconic "where were you when..." moment. 

For my parents, I'm guessing it was "...when you heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked." For us older Boomers, it's "...when Kennedy was shot." On the less gruesome side, if you lived on the East Coast, you've also got "...when the lights went out" in November 1965 when a big part of the electric grid went down. And, of course, "...when the planes struck the Twin Towers."

Me? I was away on business in Orlando, but was able to scramble back home via a slow-moving Amtrak overnighter to DC and the equally slow-moving Northeast Corridor Acela from Washington to Boston. I was back home by midnight on September 12th. My husband met me at Back Bay Station. The next day, I took a cab to a deserted Logan Airport to retrieve my car. I went to work, but nobody was getting any work done. 

Mostly we were tracking the whereabouts of colleagues who were on the road, or speculating about the last minutes in the lives of a couple of my company's employees who were working in one of our network communications centers (NOC) - the one located on a top floor of one of the Towers. When their Tower collapsed, they were on the phone with the folks at our main NOC, telling them that they had been told to get to the roof, where a helicopter would be picking them up. At least they died with hope. Our main NOC guys - one of whom I knew - heard the building go. 

It took me a long time to shake the images out of my head: the plane nosing into the buildings, the people jumping, the Towers collapsing, the survivors rushing away, the firefighters rushing in.

Although I walk by Boston's 9/11 memorial in the Public Garden several times a week, I don't spend a ton of time thinking about it any longer. So much water under all my bridges - personal, professional, political - in the past 19 years. And the current cataclysmic situations - the existential Twin Towers of the pandemic and the prospect of our country moving deeper and deeper into the hell of lawless authoritarianism, racism, science denial - have put 9/11 nearly out of my mind.

I've written about 9/11 a number of times during the years since, and here's one of my favorites: Just another day at the office.

But when I was grazing through prior 9/11 posts, I came across something I'd written in 2011, for the 10th anniversary.  

I’m naïve enough to have hoped that we’d have become better as a nation since then, and realistic enough to know that we’ve gotten worse. Unraveling, unraveled, divided, falling.

Yikes on yikes, when you think of how much further we've unraveled, how much more divided we are, how we are still falling and there doesn't seem to be any bottom. Apparently I knew things were bad in 2011, but compared to today's abyss...

All I can say is, I hope there are no more "where were you when..." days left in my life.