Remembering. Recalibrating. Rebuilding.
On that day ten years ago, I looked up at the breathtakingly beautiful clear azure blue sky before I walked into my office building in Columbus, Ohio, and felt that everything was right. Things had started going well for me at work and with my family. For the first time in a long time, my guard was down.
Not ten minutes later I saw an Internet photo showing a huge hole in the side of one of the towers at the World Trade Center. Soon, I stood before the TV in my office and watched a jetliner ram the other tower.
I knew my world had changed forever. My knees buckled, my hands shook, and I sank into my chair.
My thoughts jolted to my nineteen-year-old daughter, my husband, my parents, my siblings. My two poodles and five cats. I wanted us to be together, holding each other.
Still, a part of me was glad to be alone. I felt so unnerved and vulnerable. Terrified. I don’t like people seeing me like that and needed some time to rebuild my protective walls.
But when the towers fell and I heard the eerie noise of the first responders’ personal alarms screaming for help, it was just too much, and I ventured out of my office to find my colleagues. While I was on my way to the conference room, where the big television sat, my supervisor hugged me. I appreciated it, hugged her back, and meant it. Then we all sat around the table watching news reports and looking for Flight 93. Hoping. Praying. Fearing.
We weren’t always such a great team. We argued over petty points, sometimes undercut each other. But, as we sat around the table, we understood each other and wanted the same things. Security, stability, peace.
As we tried to absorb and believe the unbelievable television coverage from Ground Zero, what struck me most was the terror on the faces of the dust-covered people and how they clung to each other. Strangers intertwined. Nobody wanted to be alone. The trauma was too great.
I left work at noon. On the drive home I heard reports of gas stations jacking up prices to outlandish levels and people waiting in line to pay the prices before anybody else got there to get all the fuel. I started wondering what our lives would be like the next day, the next week, six months later, ten years later. I couldn’t even imagine it.
What did we have to look forward to if one minute the sky was a beautiful clear azure blue and everything was okay and in the next few minutes almost 3,000 people were dead?
I didn’t want to live in that kind of world.
Every day for weeks I woke up at 3 a.m. to sit in front of the television while workers sifted through debris at Ground Zero. Watching was all I could do to help. It was my duty.
Life went on. During the next few weeks and months people were friendly. We all had American flags flying outside our houses. We spoke to each other in stores and made way for each other in the street. We worked together to try to rebuild security, stability, and peace. Or to build something like them.
We have at least made it past the once unimaginable ten-year mark.
Yesterday, my one-year-old grandson and his daddy built a tower out of blocks. They also built a robot to guard it.
