September 11th Remembered
September 11th, 2009
Shocked. Confused. Angry. Scared. Perplexed. Awed. Sad. Vengeful. Unforgiving. Forgiving. Mad. Devastated. Panicked. Relieved. Lucky. Guilty. Worried. Furious. The emotions cycled, fluctuated, sometimes stalling and lingering, stuck as if I would never feel another emotion again, the one I was feeling, anger, for example, taking over, growing exponentially inside while other times there was barely time to register and react to the differing emotions as they came flying in from all directions, rapid fire;
I was angry, angrier than I had ever been, then just as suddenly I was overtaken by sadness for all those people, innocent people, that were hurt, must be hurt, by that unthinkable act.
My roommate, Terry woke me up, it must have been an hour early, telling me that I had to get up. I told him I didn’t have to be up for another hour to go to work, but he said I had to get up, something was going on, something big, something scary, something he didn’t really understand or know how to explain, but I had to get up. I was sleepy because I had worked late the night before and I only wanted to go back to sleep, but he persisted, insisted, that I get up, so I did. I walked into the living room just in time to see the second plane fly into the second tower of the World Trade Center.
Terry and I looked at each other and we didn’t speak; I am not sure that we could, verbally at least, but our eyes conveyed shock, disgust, anger, sadness as the voice on TV pulled our attention back. A familiar voice, a voice I recognized, but I can’t now tell you who it was or what he said. He talked and we listened as he was trying to explain an unexplainable event, an event that had to be from a book or a movie, but not real, couldn’t be real, not in America. Not in America. Never in America. I remember thinking this, hoping this, over and over as the morning went on.
I cannot remember the exact sequence of events from that day, where I was when the plane went down in that Pennsylvania field or when the Pentagon was attacked or what emotions I was feeling at any specific moment throughout the day, although I know I felt a lot of them, all of them maybe as the day progressed. I had to go into work as if it were a normal day, but it was not a normal day; it was the most devastating day I had known in my lifetime and yet I was expected to go to work and take people’s orders and bring people refills on their diet cokes like nothing was going on.
I got to work and all the servers and cooks and managers were gathered around all the TVs in the bar. They were watching CNN and FOXNews and CBS, as if they were looking around for a report saying that this wasn’t happening and when they didn’t see that report they switched the channel to NBC or ABC hoping to find the report there, but they didn’t. It happened, it really happened; we still couldn’t wrap our heads around it. How could this happen in America, who could be this evil to do this?
I remember my first table, what happened to be my only table that day. It was two ladies in their late twenties, one was pregnant. They came in during what must have been a funny story they had been telling and they were both kinda laughing. They were seated at a table on the other side of the restaurant from the bar, but the bar was visible from their table. I walked up to them and they could see that I wasn’t smiling and laughing as they were as I greeted them and they took notice, actually they seemed a little offended.
The atmosphere wasn’t what it normally was at the restaurant, the music wasn’t playing, waiters and waitresses weren’t milling about setting up for the shift laughing and joking and maybe this is what caught their attention first, I don’t know, but they stopped laughing and they looked at me and they looked at the bar at all the servers, cooks, and managers that were watching the TV and they just knew something was wrong.
They were best friends who now lived in different cities who had been out shopping and driving around all morning and hadn’t been near a TV and hadn’t heard the reports on the radio, so they had no idea of what was going on in New York or Washington or Pennsylvania and I had to tell them and I saw in their eyes what Terry must have seen in mine when he woke me up just a couple of hours earlier to tell me the news…
Shocked. Confused. Angry. Scared. Perplexed. Awed. Sad. Vengeful. Unforgiving. Forgiving. Mad. Devastated. Panicked. Relieved. Lucky. Guilty. Worried. Furious.
Posted by Kevin Lewis
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