What were you doing, decided to do, or did do on 9/11/2001?

[Hekate]

71. I was asleep after pulling another all-nighter on my doc. dissertation. Daughter phoned from work...

She told me something terrible had happened in NYC and to turn on CNN. This would have been about 9:30 a.m. California time -- because of the haze of being awakened by such shocking news and because of the continuous loops that CNN kept running, I was not sure for years if I had actually seen any of the towers falling in real time.

I never used to turn on the tv before the 5:00 news, but since those terrible days it's the first thing I do before making coffee in the morning.

My sis lived outside Boston, and the planes took off from Boston's airport. Her children's classmates lost two grandmas that day on the airplanes -- that was an immediate blow for my young niece and nephew. We checked on my husband's cousins in New Jersey -- they were okay. It took longer to get hold of my friends who worked in D.C.

My best friend and her husband were civil servants in Washington, D.C. and heard the plane hit the Pentagon. They had no way of contacting each other and it took hours for them to get home. Because of her position (speechwriter and general PR for some appointed department head) she was ultimately told that her place was at her boss's side in the event of any future evacuations to far-off locations, but she told me later that as far as she was concerned she had her own plans for evacuation should the occasion arise, and they involved getting to her family asap.

I think it hit them hardest, of the people I know. He was born in the Middle East, and has the looks and name to go with it. At a social gathering later someone decided to dump on him, and she ordered the asshole out of her house. (At some point they changed their name -- still a family name, but something less easily identifiable.) When everyone could fly again he flew his personal airplane to where the extended family gathered, and while the drinks were making the rounds the FBI came calling.

I wish I could do justice to the story of how he handled that interview. Finally unwinding with a glass of Scotch in his hand he stood in the doorway, laughed in their faces and schooled the two agents on proper investigative and interview techniques. That took balls. I'm grateful my friend wasn't the one answering the door: she's a hot-tempered Texas woman and I have a feeling it would have been the absolute last straw for her.

The behavior of the Bush/Cheney administration hit me hard. As much as I hated how they came to office, I believed that in such a dire event they would rise to the occasion. The sheer horror of Bush being whisked out of sight, incommunicado, then finally surfacing to tell us all to go shopping is something that was, in my mind, nearly equal to seeing the Towers fall because it was a harbinger of all that was to come. The almost instantaneous "discovery" of the hijackers' passports amidst the millions of tons of rubble and ash would have been laughable if not so heinous. All the lies, all the destruction, all of it.

The first responders were noble, and remain an example to us all. Christine Todd Whitman should have been locked into an office without glass in the windows near Ground Zero for the next several years for lying to New Yorkers about the air quality.

CNN outdid themselves. PBS did too, in a different way, by keeping all of their children's programming right where it was -- Fred Rogers did one of the most wonderful Public Service Announcements I've ever seen, helping parents and other caregivers understand how to keep this away from their little ones.

The day it happened was not just the one day. It was the weeks and months that followed...