Time Marches On

Time is a funny thing. Days can feel like a fleeting moment or an eternity. Months, years go by so quickly sometimes that it's surreal, and then other times they can drag on and on and on...

I read an article once that explained why it feels like days go by so slowly when we're young but then fly by as adults. When we're younger, we have less time on this earth, so when we're a kid, a year is a significant chunk of our lives. As we get older, each year is a smaller and smaller increment of our lives, and therefore the perception of time changes.

It's been 16 years since THE 9/11 happened, and yet I can still remember nearly every detail of that day with more clarity than almost any other day since.

I've always been fascinated by New York City, and spent many of my teenage daydreams fantasizing about when I finally got to move there. As a child I would watch the Cosby show and marvel at the houses in Brooklyn wishing I could live in one of those brownstones. I would draw the skyline and copy pictures from the library books, reading and watching anything that was based in or around NYC just immersing myself in the prospect of escaping the boredom that small town life presented. I was jealous of the constant activity and endless opportunities. I think this is a fairly common thing for girls in the midwest in general. An obsession with some large city somewhere, NYC and Paris being the most common.

I left my house early in the morning to pick up my paycheck from Bass Pro Shops where I was employed. It was my day off but I was pregnant, and had an early morning appointment and then grabbed my check afterward. On the way home there were cars starting to line up at the gas stations. The further I drove the longer the lines became and I remember thinking "What on earth is going on? Why are people suddenly flocking to get gas at every station?" I lived in an older victorian house that had been turned into two units. My neighbor, was extremely eccentric and strange, and I suspected some sort of mental illness as well. As I pulled into our shared driveway he comes running out of his front door to my car screaming and waving his hands wildly. "It's GONE!" he said. "ALL OF IT IS GONE!!". I asked him what he meant and told him to stay calm, everything would be okay. He just continued running in circles waving his arms and yelling "They are blowing EVERYTHING UP!" "The white house is GONE!, the pentagon is GONE!!, EVERYTHING IS GONE!!"

I remember thinking quite plainly that this guy had totally lost it and I was going to have to call the police. I slid into my doorway to hear a frighting noise on my TV that I had left on when I left earlier. The reporter on the news was witnessing the second plane hit in real time and had broken down into hysterics. I turned toward the TV just in time to see it happen and my heart sank. At that moment I panicked. I was thousands of miles away from NYC, but I knew in that moment what this all meant. I was fully aware how this event would change everything. I was terrified, and watched the TV for the following 6 hours without moving. I don't think I even got up to eat, or pee, or anything. My eyes were glue to the screen. This was long before Facebook, long before I even had regular access to a computer. I didn't even own a cell phone. I had no communication with the outside world beyond my TV, and my land line phone. Sometime during those 6 hours I talked with my mom, and some friends, and we all wondered what would happen next. Would we go to war? Would life as we knew it change drastically?

It didn't for us, but it did for the rest of the world. Travel changed. Business changed, laws changed. Everyone was different. Everyone was affected. This wasn't just a New York thing, this was an America thing. Not to say that those in NYC and close by weren't far more affected than the rest of the country because they were. I can't imagine what it must be like being a native New Yorker. I was emotional enough about the whole thing, I don't know how I could have handled witnessing something like that happening in the city I call home.

Sixteen years has gone by, yet every one of us knows exactly what we were doing that morning. Politics aside, we all have our own theories about the entire situation, and more and more people are questioning the official story. Being a "truther" has become mainstream. I think another 16 years will go by before anyone knows the truth, maybe more. Regardless, we will all stand proudly to remember those moments with everything in us.