Remembering September 11th

For me, September 11th came and went like any other day this year. I might not have noticed it was the 11th at all if I hadn't looked at the calendar that evening to see which day was our cats' birthday (9/13). I read the local newspaper every day, and it does include a few pages of international news, but it's not often I catch the news on TV. We get only one radio station, and it's not worth listening to. So in many ways it's easy for me to be quite oblivious these days. It was not so seven years ago.

I remember I was at work in Malmo, and about 4:30 in the afternoon the guy in the office next to mine came in and said that his wife (who works at a newspaper) called to say that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I envisioned someone in a small private plane trying to go out with a bang and shrugged it off. I did find it odd however that my colleague and his wife found this so newsworthy. I looked around the building to see if anyone else had heard anything, but since most people leave at 4, there was nobody else. On my way home, I put on the radio in my car instead of listening to music. By the time I got home an hour later, I understood. I spent the evening switching back and forth between the 3 TV stations that we got with the phone in my hand. My husband was away on a business trip. So were my best friends. I eventually got a call from my husband, and I got through to my mom, but I was still very alone in a totally different way than I'd been the night before.

9/11 will be one of those defining moments for a generation. The type of thing that people will always remember where they were when they heard the news, like when Kennedy was shot. Sure, I remember where I was when Reagan was shot or when the space shuttle crashed, but 9/11 was more. In the days that followed, it changed the way I saw the world. It changed me. I'm pretty sure it changed the world.

To be continued...