I still recall six years back. I was visiting a client on-site in Fort Washington, MD, at her new home, the subject of a dispute with her builder.
The builder came out to do a site inspection for punch list items; for reasons I cannot fathom, my client wanted me there. I spent most of the time just "hanging out" killing time in the client's home office.
No one had a cell phone. My last cell phone had been stolen by some north Baltimore sociopath out of my car overnight three years before. My client did not have one and, bizarrely, the builder's rep did not either. The client had no radio on, no television. I don't know whether she had internet access. No one called, and it was a new development so no one was on the street. We were in an odd vacuum.
When the builder and my client got done around 10:45 AM, we shook hands stiffly, I wished my client well and got in my Ford Aspire. Then I heard Lopez (R.I.P.) of 98 Rock talking about an attack on the World Trade Center. Those who recall Lopez know that he was a great fan of conspiracy theories and anti-government rhetoric. So hearing him talk obliquely about such events meant nothing to me.
It was when I turned on NPR that the horror of the day's events slowly sunk in - that the Pentagon had been attacked and hundreds of its workers killed 10 miles from where my client and her builder had been bickering over the 200 barely visible dings in the dining room's polished floor boards, the poor matching of the cream and white accents in the kitchen cabinetry, creaks in the door joints not remediable through the finest oil sold by Home Depot.
I am not a very sentimental person in most ways but I pulled my car over on the Beltway and actually wept, knowing that the freedom of my country had just been assassinated, that if my wife and I ever had children they would learn of freer times by stories, not experiences.
My father-in-law worked in the Pentagon at that time, but was likewise spared through odd luck. He had parked his car in the Pentagon garage and walked to a Pentagon City dentist for a scheduled routine cleaning. He had a very long walk back to Alexandria that day because of the rail transit interruptions.
The husband of a prosecutor acquaintance of mine was killed in the Pentagon, as were about 9 Princetonians and one fellow from my suburban Baltimore high school who had worked as a bond trader.
I'M still angry about 9/11, and I don't think I'll ever "get over it". The only satisfaction is that the vile and undeserved attacks on the US were turned around. We tossed a still-open can of whup-a$$ into Al-Qaeda's lap, and Oops-Ama-Bomb-laden is still too chicken to come out from under his flat rock.
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