LM - thanks.
Until the end of days may this wear on W and Ghouliani like a mafia hitman in a set of cement shoes "swimming" in the East River
that was very well done, and an absolute gut punch. I am sad today for everyone's whose story did not end the way yours did, and thankful that you did not lose your love.
what a fucked up world, and it only got worse from that day on....
sigh
In the mid 80s I got off work at 7 am, took my wife to the airport. She was going to OK City to visit a sister. Went home, crashed for about 3,4 hours. Got up, turned on the tv. It was on CNN, reporting on a plane crash at DFW. The place she had to transfer planes. Took me almost 2 hours to find out she was ok, it was a different flight. Said goodbye, started hitting the Cuervo until I calmed down.
Note: Just finished writing all of the below. I'm going to ramble a bit, but eventually get there. It's not all about 9/11, but it's about that also. It's about disasters I've been in, New York, what one can expect head/body wise being in one. Also what one can do about it. Not the final answer or anything. Just some hard-earned practical advice that works.
--jwe
Really well said LM. And beautiful as always.
Yeah. That's about right. That's how it feels. The disassociation from what's happening, both inside and outside.
Both in how it really is after the big one hits, how I remember the Nimitz freeway crash -- California, 1989 -- and the hours before and the twelve hours (and bodies) after. Till I knew my wife was alive, which I didn't for a while. Till she was home. The nightmare drive in to hell as everyone else raced away, jeans, t-shirt, Oakland A's cap (maybe a jacket.) Stepping past bodies on rebar and rubble eyes skimming past body parts trying to find anybody, just anyone still alive. Around morning I just went home.
Time acts funny, all wonky kinda. I still don't remember how the fuck I got from the basement when the earthquake hit to the upstairs outside doorway but I had Avian (3) under one arm and Chelsea (2) under the other. Left the nanny (63) in the kitchen not even remembering her till a full 30 seconds after the quake. Fuck her. She can die. But my children are going to live.
Cold man. I personally get really cold when I'm on scene. Y'all have no fucking idea. Snake does, I'd guess from some personal emails in the last few days as we've worked together. And he's actually been in the shit. But no one who's not said "this one: lives, lives, dies, lives, dies, dead already, dead, dead, save, nope, nope, um...no, and no, try for 30 seconds and if nothing then leave them, save them, walking wounded, chopper them out now." Mostly by that time people aren't screaming anymore. It's amazing how quiet it gets in the deep shit.
On 9/11 morning I was getting on the freeway access ramp in Kent when my phone rang. The girlfriend I was with for four years. The one I went crazy when it ended. This was before and we were in love. She was out of state traveling, "Turn on your radio, we've been attacked." And the first tower fell in real time. Then the second.
All day long life was quiet, slow-motion. Everyone spoke to each other on campus. Normally we walk past each other to eat, to the elevators, busy, hurrying, work to be done. Six years ago we gathered all day yet hardly spoke. By the waterfall and the fireplace, the televisions and the dining halls and the atrium. I can still hear the quiet.
Before I got married I worked on staff for one of the most well-known LGATs upstate NY near Kingston. A small town called Rosendale, and on the outskirts there's a lake with a turn-of-the-century hotel on a lake. We ran a self-help course with the obligatory ropes course. In addition to having a volunteer physician each week from around the country (ohh, vacation) and my staff job, I was the site paramedic. Not registered in NY and my National Registry had expired but what the hell, I knew how to run a code and my whole attitude towards legalities was more loose back then than today. (Climbing in the Gunks on my days off; *sighs*)
I'd been fired in a sex scandal late September 85 -- I was screwing the volunteers while being on staff; no different than any camp counselor doing the volunteers, a huge no-no -- but my fiance hadn't broken it off with me, we lived in Brooklyn's Park Slope and I worked at Tavern on the Green as a waiter. Got married November 10, took a quick two days up at Block Island and kept waiting tables all fall and Christmas Day, then a full honeymoon in the DR, having kids open oysters on the beach and bring us foo-foo drinks. Then back to work. Then I quit Tavern as we moved out of Brooklyn and out to Farmingdale on Long Island in early 1986.
First, the fucking space shuttle blew up. I was on a sales call and couldn't miss a beat. Fucking luddite didn't even care so I just kept on selling. He didn't buy. ASSHOLE. Next morning I'm driving into Manhattan and FLASH -- Time stopped and I'm pulled way way off the side off the road sobbing like a five-year-old boy for over an hour, lost it, unable to stop, weeping, alone in the car one of maybe three times in my life (other than five-ish years ago) I've totally lost control.
Worked as a temp IT guy. Not doing Word processing (the main agencies wanted WP and Wang mostly; Word was still new -- *laughs*), but the guy who got called in when no one could figure out by the temp agencies who to assign to a gig. This was winter 86 in Manhattan and I had my run of the place. It wasn't like today when everything is stratified and classified, press a button and 5,000 names pop out with every skill in the world. Back then in all of Manhattan, literally there were like 250 people who were Word qualified and three people who were full jack-of-all trades. I was one of the three.
I ended up spending the whole winter of 1986 on three gigs, no, four. One was traveling out of state for Logonet, Dr. Fernando Flores' company, who eventually hired me and moved my wife, family (to be; Avian was born 10Nov86, one year to the day after we were married) and I to the Bay Area come late spring. I managed events for them, traveling to the west coast, and right there in Manhattan and up in Boston.
Second, I threw the NY Times every morning from our station wagon out on the island. Great gig, decent tips. Lots of fun skidding the car in the snow to make 180's on tight streets. Loved watching the seasons change, counting the squirrels. But it really fracks up your brakes quick.
Third, a little work for the NY City Legal folks around or just below midtown.
But Four, the overwhelming amount of work I did (on temp assignment) was in the old WTC7 building working for American Express on databases. Also playing and beating (including the infamous last point) Adventure. YES. I am a wizard. (I still have my maps of the maze(s). *cracks up*). Oh...gamers? If you can't beat Adventure, I don't care what you can beat. Lamers.
Anyway, when the towers came down, it had been 15 years since I'd lived in the city, 10 since I'd visited. But one last thing. That LGAT I mentioned working for upstate? Yeah. The most popular LGAT in the world. On September 11 their New York offices were on the lower floors of the World Trade center. Most every one I knew in New York City was paid to work in the god damn building, and the rest spent 20-30 hours a week there volunteering. (Yeah, it's an LGAT. They volunteer a lot. Don't go there with me today, okay? I agree with you, it's not good.)
(Cont.)
Steve used to say 9/11 belonged only to the people who were there.
No. It doesn't. Any more than the Loma Prieta earthquake belongs only to those of us who climbed through the rubble of the viaduct in Oakland, who fought the Marina fires in San Francisco, or were in the stadium as the Giants and A's warmed up for Game 3 of the Series.
Disasters touch everyone. Freeze frame, jump cut, MOS (no sound.) Years later, stuff still jumps out at you from the events of the day and week while other parts may be lost or hidden.
I speak now as an authority, both from long personal experience and from extensive research over many years. What I'm saying is the current state of the art: To the extent parts of a traumatic event remain out of awareness, they will act as a or as a set of triggers, causing you to automatically replay the moods, thoughts, feelings, concerns, fears, hopes, and in more extreme cases, colors, sights, sounds, music, physical sensations and so on, of the event in question.
All that is necessary to start with for an event to lose its power over you is to pull it up to awareness. You do NOT need to "come to peace" with it, "accept" it, "make it okay with yourself", "just get it", or any of that west-coast 80's horse-shit. Simply replay the incident on the closed screen of your memory over and over till you can watch it from start to finish. That's it. That's enough to take the largest part of the charge off the thing. Will stuff still be there for you? Yeah, probably. But that's for you to work out, with a therapist if you need to. All I'm concerned about is the stuff you don't know is working on you -- because it's happening unawaredly.
As you might imagine I have an enormous background in working through suppressed incidents, both my own and those of others. If you've been in a major incident which troubles you, run it through your mind's vision, hearing, feeling, thoughts -- however you do it when you "remember it as if I was there." Repeat till you can do the whole thing from start till finish and feel confident you've got the whole incident with nothing major left out. Then get on with your life. If it still bugs you, tell the story from start to finish to a good friend. That failing, to a therapist.
Why tell the story to someone else? Communicating takes the story out of our head and gives it to someone else. It lets you begin to separate what happened from the story of what happened. What happened is just what happened: The ground shook. The freeway collapsed. X lived, x died. That's what happened. I was scared. I thought I might die. I hate the bastards who designed the fucking viaduct, how could they DO that? Those are stories. They have deep meaning to you and probably to others. So tell them. But simply getting what happened clear in your head distinct from your craziness and confusion about the incident, will go an enormous way towards clearing about your craziness and confusion about the incident. Any incident. Even that asshole who took the three-hole punch from the copy-station last week and won't give it back.
Anything you suppress will turn around and bite you down the road. And true disasters are a hotbed of supressed communication, simply because what happened leaves us shook up, not certain of what happened.
So communicate. First say what happened. Start at the beginning, go through to the end: This happened, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened. The end. Second, tell us how you feel, what your story and emotions are: I'm upset. I'm angry. You wouldn't belive! For hours I didn't even know if... I wanted to SCREAM! I still wake up with smoke in my mouth. I can't eat roast pork 'cause it smells like...
What happened v. the story of what happened. Starting with at least bringing the whole incident at least up to your personal awareness. So it will stop triggering you, using you, grabbing you.
By yourself, with your wife, husband, best friend, brother or sister, or therapist, get whatever you need to say, said.
Feel free to use this thread to tell your story.
I was a big MSNBC fan until yesterday morning. Fuck them... up the ass with a red, hot branding iron.
BTW - Steven was right. "Everyone" may have been "touched" by what happened on 9/11 - but it "belongs" only to those of us who were here. Period.
Thank you so much, LM. I have clipped and saved it.
Again, LM, please tell me you're writing a book.
Damn. That was powerful. After reading it, I feel I was there with you on that day that I'll never, ever forget. I worked in DC a few blocks from the White House at that time, and I have my own story of that day, but nothing can compare to what happened to the people of New York. Anyone else who tries to own it-- especially anyone on TV who tries to appropriate it for some kind of ratings-grab-- is slime-sucking scum. And Christie Todd Whitman can go to hell.
I wasn't there, but I spent all day trying to find out if my friends in New York were still alive. Fortunately they survived, but an ex-girlfriend of a former roommate lived only because she had stopped before work to vote. Everyone else in her WTC office died.
Two months later I was at Thanksgiving dinner at my sister's. Her house had the largest American flag I had ever seen hanging from the second floor almost clear down to the ground. The subject somehow came up - I didn't raise it - and I told the story of my day. Turned out that sis and husband had been out camping that week and didn't know anything had happened until days later. Yes, perhaps the only people in the country who didn't go through the experience in real time. After the dinner she acted extremely hostile and later I heard that I had been "depressing". I haven't talked to her, other than business matters, since.
Thanks again, George.
Thank you for sharing this. Your writing is incredible.
It's amazing to me that the one thing everyone remembers is the sky. I was in Toronto, and even I remember the sapphire blue...
Thank you again.
I remember the sky, too.
It was that same Indian Summer day on the west coast that morning -- beautiful and warm and blue, with just the lightest scent of fall in the air. The kids and I were at home on our little ranch just a mile south of Half Moon Bay (that blufftop hotel where they filmed "American Wedding" was at the other end of our driveway, where it came down to the sea), in a lovely green valley that dropped away down to the Pacific.
That part of the coast is on the approach to SFO, so, all day and all night, that sky was always criss-crossed with contrails, and hummed with the distant whoosh of jets three thousand feet overhead. But I remember going out on my balcony that morning, looking over the dead autumn pastures and the neighbors' farmhouses and the blue line of the Pacific in the distance -- and reveling in the sheer silence, the unremitting blueness of the sky without its usual lacing of contrails, the peacefulness of the countryside the way it had once been before jets overwhelmed redtail hawks in the local sky.
That silence lasted for several days, and on every one of them, I made a point of going outside and spending some time listening to it. Without the jets, there were just birdsongs in the canyon, contented livestock grazing obliviously in the field, and the wind in the grass. It was a comfort to the soul, an antidote to the fear -- something ancient and enduring that took me out of the devastation of this world, and carried me back to a world in which such things were not yet possible.
My children were homeschooled during those years. My husband, already at work 50 miles away, called me about 8:15 and told me to turn on the TV. I watched the CNN coverage for about half an hour in the quiet house, turning it over and over in my head. Finally, I collected myself, and went to tell my children.
I shook my daughter, then 11, awake gently, and sat beside her on her big white iron bed. "There will be just a few days in your life that the world will change forever," I began, choosing my words carefully. "Your grandparents will never forget Pearl Harbor." (We'd been to Hawaii a few months earlier, so Pearl Harbor was fresh in her mind.) "People my age remember where they were when Kennedy was killed. And today is one of those days for you."
I gathered her up, and rousted her brother. We went up to my room and cuddled in the big bed, watching the film over and over as the towers crashed. Around 10:30, my husband came home. He'd stopped at the bank, and taken out a five-figure sum of cash. As soon as he got settled, he dug a rifle out of the storage locker, and set a box of ammo nearby. Nobody knew what was going to happen, but if anyone tried to take advantage of the chaos and our remote location, we would be ready.
And that was the day we had our first conversation about moving to Canada -- not because we were afraid of anything more than a little local looting; but because we both understood that this was going to unleash the fascist-wannabes on the right, and lead us to an America we did not want our children to grow up in.
We left 28 months later, to the day.
LM,
Damm that was a powerful story. I was on the other side of the world at the time, Sydney Australia to be precise, watching a late night movie on television when I see at the bottom of the screen, "Two airplanes crash into the World Trade Center in New York". For about 30 minutes the text was scrolled across the bottom of the screen and I was thinking that probably what happened was that two small planes tried to avoid hitting each other and instead crashed into the buildings.
Well, the full horror emerged when the movie stopped and the station cut to the CNN live broadcast. My then girlfriend called at 1:30 AM and we stayed on the phone till 6:30.
Jumpin' jebus on a pogo stick, LM.
Spine chills and near tears.
Write the damn book. And then write another one.
On The Day I was presenting a paper to the Instrumentation Society of America in Houston, having flown there the day before.
I am a fat bastard. Always have been. But Mrs. B and I were both doing weight-watchers; and I had dropped about 50 pounds. It was nice.
At the time of the attacks I was standing in front of a room full of people going on about industrial Ethernet technology, blah, blah-- perhaps the one best presentation I've ever made. Afterwards, I answered questions, then walked out into the convention center proper-- where everyone was focused on every TV screen in the building... watching the towers burn... and collapse.
The gut-punch for me was that I had been on an aeroplane the day before-- "there but for the grace of God."
9 months of weightwatching- no snacks, no beer. I walked back to my hotel; sat and watched more coverage. Got fed up with it all.
I walked out of that room, walked three blocks to a gas-station/mini-mart; purchased three large cans of Foster's and a big sack of pork rinds.
Fuck weight loss.
Took them back to the room, drank, crunched, stared at the tube.
I was lucky (all of us who weren't in Manhattan that day were lucky; but) I was able to find a National rentacar at the airport that Thursday. Spent all day thursday and friday driving home to Cleveland. Spent most of that time on my cell phone with Mrs. B... trying to focus on just driving one more mile... one more hour... and all I wanted in this wide world was to be home.
Every time I stopped for gas, I'd see "us." All the people stranded by the air closure; driving through nowhere U.S.A., we all recognized each other. We'd nod, solemnly, at each other; congregants at a rolling wake.
And roll on.
FB
Mrs. Robinson, I remember that empty sky too, down here in New Orleans.
My partner A's favorite cousin is married to a Sandy Whitman. Yes, the same Whitman family, but he's one of the nice ones. Sandy's firm had moved their office to a new location in Manhattan, but we didn't know just where.
So A called directory for Manhattan, and amazingly got through to an operator. He gave the firm's name, got a phone number, asked for an address, and started getting a robot-voiced spiel about checking the phone book being the preferred...
A lost it and yelled, "Just tell me they're not anywhere near the World Trade Center!!" In a completely human voice the lady gave an address way uptown, and said quietly, "Whoever they are, they're OK."
That day even the phone company's robo-operators couldn't help but be human.
On that day, living on the west coast, somehow I managed to get my son up, dressed, and off to kindergarten without turning on a stereo or tv. After dropping him off, I was on the way to work, and turned on the radio to hear some guy who sounded like Peter Jennings say, The second tower at WTC has fallen. I thought to myself, what the fuck kind of War of the Worlds crap is my radio station playing. Then the shaken voice of the local dj came on to confirm that we were under attack.
At the time, it did feel like a "we" moment, but always my concern was for the people in NYC (and Washington DC) who were in the midst of the chaos. I knew they would be unable to get information and at the time we didn't know if 3,000 or 30,000 people had died, been killed.
It was a horrific day, but I know I did not feel anything like a New Yorker felt. One of the reasons I loved The News Blog (and now The Group Newsblog) so much is because I am able to get a the New York perspective of current events, and you are all far more sanguine about most things than MSM would like us to be.
A very powerful piece LM, thank you.
Jesse, excellent advice. My experience with trauma, while less extensive than yours, prompts me to add this: If you're the spouse/sibling/friend, feel honored. This task, listening to your loved one's trauma, is a little part of the burden you can carry.
The most important, powerful words in our language, to someone who has survived a trauma, are: Do you want to tell me what happened?
And, thanks for opening it up. Do I want to talk about the smell, the quiet, the squishy sounds I heard after the Loma Prieta quake brought down my commute route?
Not really, but that's because I already have, thanks.
Six years ago, we were exploring the ruins of Corfe Castle in Dorset, in England. Funny thing, kind of ironic in a way, given events......... the place was destroyed by rebels........... rebels against the king (Charles I), part of the Civil War (English).
Anyway, having explored a ruin, we get home, and my father turns on the radio, as we're all doing our thing, and announces that 'the US Eastern seaboard has been shut down!' Sounds strange, so we turn on the TV.................. and well you know the rest.
(I should say that the music the BBC played as the broadcast ended many hours later was god awful!)
One's experiences are whatever they are, I guess. After about 30 seconds of processing what I was hearing on the radio (I sleep with it on just above whitenoise level), my day started with enough adrenaline to launch a rocket when I heard the phrases "evacuating the White House" and "fire at the Pentagon," not because of any geopolitical worries, but because close family and friends worked in the District. Ricocheted about getting phone and numbers, and setting the world's record for serial long distance calls, establishing contact procedures; service into to the district was still clear, but my first fear had been that whatever was happening might take out the phones.
It was only during the last call, maybe 10 minutes later at a few minutes past 10am, that the significance of what I was hearing on the radio about the World Trade Center, and the tremendous rush of shattering that I had barely noticed, cleared up for me. Over the phone, in the background, I heard my mother exclaim something, maybe "No!" while my father said to me, "O-o-oh my. You better get to your TV. You just have to see it."
So by the time I understood what was happening at WTC, I was already in a very heightened state, thuogh would otherwise have been calming down shortly. There is nothing like adrenaline for flooding the mind.
When I lived in New York, I loved to roam the city. I'd go out of my way to get walking time into whatever the business of the day was, at least as part of getting to or from work. I got no use for a city you can't walk around in. Especially, I loved the city at night, and comparing the day and night in interesting places. During the day, the Wall St. area was electric, full of bustling charged particles whose fields attracted, repelled, and occasionally created discharges. The WTC was prickly with static, strangely humid. But at night, the towers almost seemed to breathe, the behavior of the air around and through them no doubt being exaggerated by their size and the fact that there were two of them. And the Plaza was so quiet that it seemed you could hear for miles, and years.
Part of the awe of that day for me was the sky, and the profanation of the sky by those horrible smoky plumes that I saw on the tele-vision. In Ann Arbor too, it was the clearest, deepest blue I think I've ever seen. Curious after a while, I checked the radar maps on the Weather Channel: there was not a cloud over North America that morning.
Thanks for writing this, Lower Man.
I was teaching an 8:30 class that day, in a smart classroom equipped with the Internet. At the end of the class, I switched on the computer to show the students something, and the Internet wouldn't come up, which was really weird. I apologized, dismissed the class, and greeted my next batch--one of whom told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I thought it had to be an accident, because I'd flown over the Trade Center several times. Then he said the Pentagon was on fire. Still not knowing what had happened, I preceded to teach the class. At the end, I again turned on the Internet--and saw that the towers had collapsed. I had to grab the desk with both hands to keep from falling myself. On the drive home from work--the school closed early that day--I heard the NPR announcer saying that the World Trade Center was gone, and that was when I burst into tears.
In December I went home for the first time since 9/11. I was really sick that holiday season, and stopped into a Korean restaurant in Edison, NJ to get some dinner before heading to my aunt's. It was Christmas Eve and packed with people, mostly Asian-Americans. Many of them spoke in Korean to the proprietor as they walked in, and she handed a calendar to each one. When my food was finally done, she offered me one as well. It was a 2002 calendar in which the picture for every month was a picture of the World Trade Center. Well, I lost it, just started sobbing and sobbing. You could feel the weight of 9/11 on the whole metro area that holiday season.
On 09/11/01, I was supposed to have done my laundry the previous day, but didn't due to an errand I had to run. I rely on the bus to get places, and bus-rides in a city such as Milwaukee are rather long rides. So I decided to do my laundry on Tuesday before I went to work. That would mean getting up a little bit earlier than usual, no big deal.
So when I got up that Tuesday morning, I went to my TV and thought I shouldn't bother turning it on because I'm going to be right out the door to get going on that laundry. But then I decided that I should turn on the TV anyway. And of course, by then both towers had just fallen, and the networks were showing video of it again and again.
I was a fan of shit-disturbing libertarian activist Michael Ruppert for a while, and so for a long time it was part of my official political mythology that 9/11 was an inside job. These days my perspective is, how can we sitting at home or at the office in front of our monitor screens really know what happened that day? My evaluation is that the 9/11 "truthers" (many of whom a far-right militia-nutters, BTW) are just as much barking up the wrong tree as the consensus-reality police who demand that everybody think the same way and maintain that 9/11 "inside job" theories are automatically untrue on the basis of these allegations being "conspiracy theories".
That upon which we can agree is the callous manner in which BushCo exploited a very rare moment of total national unity to further their small-minded partisan agenda. Bickering about "what really happened" can only distract us from the job of opposing BushCo's imperial adventures and constitution-shredding.
L&L -
Good for you.
Nice to see someone who was, um, over the edge with the nonspecific cultists realize it doesn't matter. What matters is precisely what you said:
we can agree [on] the callous manner in which BushCo exploited a very rare moment of total national unity to further their small-minded partisan agenda. Bickering about "what really happened" can only distract us from the job of opposing BushCo's imperial adventures and constitution-shredding.
Bravo.
Most people who go over the edge -- be it cults, health, or just bad craziness -- don't come back. Their vote gets canceled, that is, it costs them the privilege of having regular people take them seriously.
As someone who wandered that lonely road in multiple directions on and off over many years in many many ways, without a trace of irony or condescension I say, congratulations on making it back; extra congratulations on being able to speak powerfully of your trip in a way which makes sense. We need more people like you. Well done. --jwe
As someone who wandered that lonely road in multiple directions on and off over many years in many many ways, without a trace of irony or condescension I say, congratulations on making it back; extra congratulations on being able to speak powerfully of your trip in a way which makes sense. We need more people like you. Well done.
I think your congratulations may be a bit premature. I don't categorically rule out the possibility that, for instance, BushCo knew the attacks were a possibility and perhaps deliberately allowed them to go down. I'm just saying it's not worth dwelling upon because how is someone like me, sifting through websites of varying quality and reliability on the Internet, supposed to know for sure one way or the other? Such presumption strikes me as akin to arrogance.
That's not what I'm congratulating you on.
But for realizing you can't make a difference here in the world where most people are, bringing word of crazy weird shit. People in the real world don't want to hear the crazy crap. It drives them, well, nuts. They just can't hang.
So even if there was an actual conspiracy, it doesn't really matter at this point. Just like I don't care who killed JFK. There are more important matters to worry about. Like health care for everyone and stopping disease in Africa. Oh, and energy. We're running out and there's this whole "the world is getting too hot" problem. And the possibility of some nukes being thrown at Iran sometime soon.
These I worry about. Who did what to whom six years ago? Not caring. My point is, people who spend their life tracking secrets, lose the opportunity to be out here with the rest of us trying to change the larger world. My congratulations to you was on choosing to play in the big world, not the little world. You only get to play in one, and most people who get thrown into the world of secrets, find it so paranoid and weird, they can get lost there for a long, strange, time. You made it back to the rest of us. Good work.
I was actually sleeping in late that day, after a late night grading appers. I woke to a call from my son, who was a college junior doing a study-abroad in Spain. "Mom," he said, "what's this about terrorists blowing up Congress!?" (The story he'd gotten was very confused, obviously.)
I had no idea what he was talking about, and I didn't even have a TV. I also don't listen to radio (I'm too hearing-impaired), so I called a friend, woke him up, and asked him to turn on CNN and tell me what was going on. In other words, I got the news about the attack from a call from Spain.
My daughter was doing a study-abroad in England that same semester, and had left a week early to spend a week in Ireland before settling down in England for the semester. Her study-abroad group was scheduled to leave Newark, NJ, airport on Sept. 12, but of course no planes were flying. She got to London in time for the start of the semester, because she had gone to Ireland a week early. But thew students and teachers in her study-abroad group were two weeks late getting to England for the semester because of the lockdown on airpots in the US.
Only the bin Ladens were allowed to fly during that period.
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