The Window
When I awoke on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I had no reason to feel anything other than unbridled hopefulness.
My family was well, including my two toy poodles and five cats. Our daughter had begun her own life, having moved into a brand new apartment with a friend. Everything in our lives moved ahead, often better than we expected.
Up for a promotion at work. I felt valued and competent and purposeful as my colleagues and I worked together for the State of Ohio to improve technology in schools. On September 10, I traveled from Columbus to Chillicothe for a town meeting on the subject.
The day before, Sunday, I had driven part of that same route with my husband, south from Columbus, halfway to Chillicothe, to visit a farmer’s market. We munched on crispy, sweet, freshly picked corn on the cob, butter dripping down our wrists. We indulged in homemade sausage sandwiches. We reveled in the coming of autumn, my favorite season.
I remember making a point to look around at other patrons. The place was packed. Families. Moms and dads and kids of all ages, even normally reluctant teenagers, enthusiastically engaging in traditional harvest activities. Laughter. Smiling faces. Discussions about shopping for the perfect Halloween pumpkin and lighthearted disagreements about what perfect meant in that context.
Everything seemed as it should. We felt goodness and security all around us.
Then at 8:46 a.m. on September 11 the lines of goodness and security became blurred if not erased.
At work when the attacks occurred, I watched television in my office and then with coworkers in the conference room. Though we didn’t always agree on work matters and often let petty squabbles get between us, on that day we needed to be together. The looks on our faces: the combination of surprise and agony of people trapped in an unimaginable nightmare. Things like what we were seeing on TV just don’t happen in real life. Do they?
My whole body shook as I drove home around noon. I just wanted to get home and feel safe. Out of the radio came stories about gas prices spiking and lines forming to get all the gas that maybe would ever be available. Fear was already driving us.
When I got home, I still didn’t feel any safer. Like everyone else, I turned on the television.
I wondered what the world would be like the next day. I wondered what our lives would be like six months later, ten years later.
I couldn’t even imagine it. How could I trust anything my mind would conjure about the future when I had been so wrong about today?
Now thirteen years later, we feel we’ve reached some sense of normalcy. We’ve become accustomed to concerned faces on television telling us of terrorist chatter. We sacrifice our privacy at airports for the safety of all. That’s what human beings are driven to do: find a way to survive.
I have heard that only one window from the World Trade Center survived the terrorist attack. Just one out of hundreds. It’s part of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City.
I remember how helpless I felt looking through windows in the towers, seeing people inside on that terrible day. I wonder if I saw someone looking out that surviving window waiting for help that would never come. Those images are forever branded on my brain and my heart.
The fact is that none of us will ever again be able to see the world without looking through that window.
