High School weeks comes to an abrupt end.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUk7uV2ua4o&feature=related
At the end of high school I started a summer "love" with a girl heading to NYU. It was one of those, "wait you thought I was good looking all this time? I thought you were a babe the past four years!" things that only comes in the summer after high school. Rather than trying to force it with me in Buffalo and her in New York we ended it before it we ruined out friendship. We would trade e-mails back and forth and on a Tuesday morning in September she sent me an e-mail saying how great things were going and how I should come and see her. A paragraph or so later she said that she heard some loud noises and that something was going on outside. She said she would e-mail me back later. The time stamp was 9:01AM on September 11th, 2001. A few days later she got back to me. She said words can never describe what it was like so I never asked. I figured it was the kind of thing that made you grow up too fast. She transferred the next semester.
Feel free to share your stories from ten years ago in the LTEs.
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I remember it like it was yesterday. I was up early as I had a late AM meeting scheduled with the curator of the gallery my show was about to open at in less than a month. As fate would have it, I'd turned on the TV that morning for some white noise while my coffee brewed. Matt Lauer was nattering on about something that was of no interest to me, when he suddenly mentioned they had "breaking news"--something about a small plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers. Suddenly, my interest was piqued, so I sat down on the couch to see what was happening. I don't think I left the television for the next 20 hours, other than for food, beverage and bathroom breaks.
I'd spoken with a friend of mine the night before. The film she was working on (Raising Victor Vargas) was gonna be shooting on a rooftop on the Lower East Side early the next morning. It was about 3-4 days later when I finally got in touch with her. The second plane flew directly over their heads and they watched it smash into the tower less than a mile away. Needless to say, she was freaked out.
Since it was my 40th birthday, and I didn’t want to deal with black balloons and tombstone cake at work, I took a vacation day instead. We were near the peak of Solar Cycle 23, and there were several sunspots visible to the (protected) unaided eye, so I took my solar viewer glasses to Runner daughter’s elementary school and was a guest lecturer at the science classes, giving views of the sunspots and answering questions about stars and the sun.
As it turns out, it was a great way to help for a moment to take my mind off the devastation happening in NYC, at the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania. It was also a way to occupy the children with something besides the scary information that they had managed to pick up that morning, too.
I do remember taking Runner daughter to piano lessons that evening, and then trying to think of the best route home that didn't pass a gas station, since misguided folks were in long lines for gas (and [redacted] gas station owners started price gouging). We skipped going out for a nice supper and ended up eating at home and following the news.
Birthdays have never been the same.
It was a work friend's 21st birthday, which I'm only just now remembering, and a bunch of us went to TGI Friday's since it was nice to get out and see some people to talk with about it. The birthday girl said something selfish about how the attacks had ruined her birthday, and a lot of us stared back at her, figuring if someone had to say something, she'd never understand. Yeah, her day was ruined more than anyone's.
I've had more people tell me that than I ever felt that way. We had been planning on TGIF's; we ended up going there sometime a month later, and they still wished me happy birthday and brought out ice cream or whatever. I'm Scandinavian; I'll deal with it.
Both of my brothers-in-law lived in Manhattan at the time (and do again) . Lots of dust in the air for weeks.