Remembering

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the first thing I noticed was that WMAY, our principal AM news station, was hosting a live remote from the Mel-O-Cream doughnut shop at the Sixth Street end of our alley. (It’s now a Jimmy John’s.) I grabbed a free doughnut and headed to work. It was about 7:50 a.m. When I got to work, several things happened simultaneously: I heard some sort of accident had happened at the World Trade Center, I got a call from my wife saying a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers, and I noticed I couldn’t reach any of the news Web sites I had bookmarked on my computer.

We didn’t have a TV in the building, but my wife had one in her office, so she fed me regular updates. The second plane hit the WTC at about the same time we were able to set up a radio to hear the news from New York. My wife, who had had a bad feeling with the first plane strike, now was convinced we were under attack.

Of course, it was hard for me to form any opinions, as I couldn’t see what was going on. The Web was still log-jammed from billions of hits from people like me, who were wondering what the hell was going on. Then, I got the call from my wife saying the Pentagon had been hit. That’s when I really started to panic.

But there was no time for panic, as one of my work colleagues who had planned to get married in the county courthouse two blocks away had decided that she was going through with the wedding. I joined the procession of work friends who made the quiet walk to the courthouse. I remember looking out the window of the fifth floor wondering if a county courthouse in a capital city was a viable target. As it turned out, the wedding went off without a hitch. In retrospect, it was a bold statement that life could go on in the midst of such barbarism.

But life would never be the same. And I guess that’s what I carry with me five years later: an anger that 19 fanatics could rob a country of its innocence and joy – a robbery from which I would argue we still haven’t recovered. Nor may we ever. That there has to be a post-9/11 world still fills me with bitterness if I think about it too long. But today is a day for remembering. And despite the bitterness remembrance brings, I owe it to those who died that day to remember.

As do we all.