Tuesday, September 11, 2007

azimuth

Of course I remember where I was and what I was doing. I remember how the speaker at the front of the room stopped talking, while the whispers in the audience grew louder. I remember standing on tiptoe, trying to see the screen suspended over the hotel bar. I remember how people covered their mouths with their hands. But mostly I remember what everyone remembers: the blue overhead, the dazzling, empty, bewildering blue. It's hard to imagine the sky will ever be that blue again.

14 comments:

Julia said...

Right before it happened I posted a message on the message board I was part of at the time announcing my pregnancy with Monkey-- 12 weeks and change. And then I went to make breakfast and turn on the news.

Brenda said...

I just cant believe its been 6 years. It feels like 12 months ago for me here in Oz so i can only imagine what it feels like for all of you over there.

Hugs
xxx

Anonymous said...

I remember that day well. I had just gotten to work and we were watching the news on the small tv in the boardroom. We got in trouble for not working. People perished, families were changed forever, there was a sense of loss on so many levels. And the bitch I was working for was pissed off that nobody was working. It pissed me off that it didn't seem to have any impact on her and she expected us to all be heartless drones like she was.

EmmaL said...

I was sitting in my trademark law class when someone came running in. We all sat down in the halls for hours and watched the televisions that they had pulled into the halls. They shut the university down. We sat there for hours.

BasilBean said...

I had first period planning which meant that I arrived to work about twenty minutes after school started (I am NOT a morning person and despite my best intentions I will take every moment given to me in the morning). Even though I was in the car for almost an hour on my commute into work I didn't know what had happened. It was my practice to spend the time in the car in solitude, not to let the news of the day into my awareness until after I had been awake for a few hours. Before I could enter my classroom a fellow teacher grabbed my arm and said "the other tower has been hit." I will remember the look of pain and compassion in his eyes forever as he realized that I had no idea what he was talking about. He pulled me into his classroom where he had the tv on. School that day was about talking about what had happened and helping the kids (and ourselves) sort out what in the world was going on.

Magpie said...

Somehow, the fact that it was grey and overcast and raining yesterday made it easier.

Beruriah said...

I was in Jerusalem and waiting for my roommate to come home. She was very late, so I picked up my cellphone to call and the networks were dead (must have been over busy). Scared me intensely for local reasons - so I turned on the radio and heard the news, "The United States is under attack," and reports of explosions in New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, and other places. It was surreal and confusing, and it took days for me to learn whether friends who worked in the WTC were okay. By the next morning we knew it wasn't as extensive as we'd heard.

Do you know, to this day the only image I've seen of it is one of some smoke from one of the towers and a dust-covered man with a briefcase. I've kept it that way deliberately.

niobe said...

magpie: that's exactly what lawmommy said.

my reality: I guess some people really do have absolutely no compassion for others. I can't imagine what it must have been like to work for someone like that.

meg said...

I was in the middle of a big project/launch and had been working non stop for weeks. That day was the first day off (for some reason). I was so glad that I was at home, and not with people I didn't really know. We watched the news together in complete and utter shock.

Catherine said...

It was that blue on the day Alex died too. I HATE days with those kinds of blue skies now.

Furrow said...

I was in one of my grad classes later that day, and the professor, who was Chinese, expressed sympathy but then insisted we move on with class because "suffering is a part of life." I remembered thinking, "Damn. That's so Buddhist."

(No offense intended to the Chinese or Buddhists)

Ms. Planner said...

I just remember how quiet it was that day. Even driving to work, in traffic, 3000 miles away on the West Coast. It was just. so. quiet.

Christine said...

our blue skies are forever hazy now.

sigh.

Anonymous said...

I heard it on the radio and thought, hoped, this was a hoax. I had no TV, the internet was dragged down by everyone trying to find out what was going on... but slowly it sunk in that this was real, awfully real.
And now it is very odd to live in a place where this day is -- had been since 1980, for entirely different reasons of course -- the national holiday.