A generation has passed. Twenty years. The day we lost our invulnerability. Oh, we never really had that, but with oceans east and west, we considered ourselves… safe.
How wrong we were.
If you’re over 25, you know in your soul what I mean. If you’re younger, you’ve lived with it all your lives and it’s “normal.”
I don’t ask “where were you” or “what were you doing” on 9-11. Because courtesy requires that I listen to the answers, when what I really want to do is tell my story. How I thought sure at first it was a small plane and an accident. How horrible it was to be so damn wrong.
No, I remember the voice-mail my Dad left me, while our manager had us in a conference room pretending to work as the rest of the company went home. The rumors of further planes aimed at the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Needle in Seattle, the Arch in St. Louis and our own CityPlace in Hartford.
Thank God these were rumors, reality was so Gadawful.
Remember September 12. It was beautiful. No one was white or black, democrat or republican, none of that mattered. We were all Americans. Proud, wounded americans.
We sang together, our unofficial national anthem, God Bless America; it was our prayer. We smiled at one another, waved with our whole hands and hearts and waved our flags unapologetically.
I hoped that this togetherness would last. That it would not fade back into the political and racial division we’ve long endured. Maybe now America would be an amalgam of all the world, humanity joined together for the best of all us.
Hope springs eternal.
Please Be Kind.
September 11, 2021
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