I should start by saying that this post has absolutely no point. It’s just me, expressing our collective sadness, remembering a moment in time, wishing for a different world, a better world.
As the events in New York, Virginia and Pennslyvania were unfolding on that day twenty-five years ago, I was oblivious. I was a mom. My children were ages two years and two months and three months old and my youngest was still to come along. My then husband was at work. We three were at home in Sunol, doing our morning thing. That meant getting dressed, having breakfast and watching Sesame Street. I had made an appointment at Sears for my daughter to have her three-month-old photos taken. It’s a good time for baby pictures. At three months they can smile and giggle, you can prop them up in cute poses. It works. I did them with all three of my babies.
So, I load up the kiddos and we head to Sears in Stone Ridge Mall. It’s not there anymore. My first clue that the world had changed was the entire mall was dark. Sears was the only store open. The gals in the picture studio updated me on what little information was available. Planes (multiple) being used as bombs. No one was clear on how many there were or would be. No one knew where one might strike next. Hijacking was something in our reality. We had seen it. You negotiated with the hijackers, you flew them where they needed to go, they usually got arrested. We didn’t know about suicide bombers, yet. This was something new and likely one of the reasons more passengers didn’t fight back or, at least, fight back sooner. The people on the planes, like me, didn’t know yet that the world had changed.
There are plenty of individuals far more eloquent than me who will eulogize that day, its victims and our shared loss and sorrow in terms that will better express everything inside me, everything I am struggling to articulate. There is this surreal dichotomy to our lives before we knew about 9/11. There’s the world we had before the towers fell, the planes went down. Then there’s the world after and the complete pathos in that shift for every one of us. Everything changed.
People ask the usual question, “Where were you when the towers fell?” Me? I was watching Sesame Street.
