9-11-01

10 years.  I'm getting emotional just watching and listening to the coverage today.  I will never forget where I was, what I was doing, what I was thinking, or how I felt that day.  I blogged about it in 2008, and thought I would repost it today....

It's crazy looking back how September 11, 2001 seems so long ago, yet so recent. So much has changed. I remember waking up that day, going to my first day of work at my new job (Department of Mental Health Chart Room....you don't know fun until you spend your day filing papers in those charts), and hearing about the first tower on the radio. Listening and wondering if it was an accident or not. Calling Brian to find out if he'd heard about it. Then the second one hit. My friend Maura and I took our charts and papers to be filed upstairs and spent the day filing and watching the news.

I remember wondering how it could possibly be happening. Then my mom called and told me that my dad, a firefighter and member of the FEMA team, was being sent to the Pentagon. On my way home to say good bye to my dad I had my windows down and was listening to the radio. One moment that I remember very clearly was sitting at a traffic light in my '83 Volvo and the guy in the car next to me looked at me and "Isn't it a shame? We just have to keep them all in our prayers."

That's what those next few weeks and months were about. Praying for everyone touched by the tragedy of the day. Reaching out to friends and neighbors. Candles burning in the windows of homes in vigil. Brian's window also had a Wanted: Dead or Alive poster of bin Laden. Brian and I went to Atlanta the next month for the NLCS between the Diamondbacks and the Braves and the National Anthem never meant so much to me as it did then. And I remember very clearly the Yankees postseason in 2001. The 9th inning homers of Scott Brosius and Tino Martinez on back to back nights to pull the Yanks through to Game 7. The heartbreak that I felt for all the people in New York that were rooting for the Yankees because for nine innings every game, they had something to root for.

I don't want to discuss the election or bring a debate on future Presidents to my blog, but today Barack Obama said that after September 11th, "Americans across our great country came together to stand with the families of the victims, to donate blood, to give to charity, and to say a prayer for our country. Let us renew that." As we should.