Remembering the Morning of September 11

This essay was originally published in a 7×7 Magazine tribute in September of 2001.

At 6:21 a.m., the telephone rings in the apartment I share with my husband in San Francisco’s Castro District. My mother, two time zones away in Mobile, Alabama, says, “Do you know?”

“Know what?”

“You better turn on the TV.”

The pictures do not register. Something is burning, something familiar. But it isn’t possible; surely the burning building isn’t what I think it is. Then the voice-over confirms, “The World Trade Center has been hit by a commercial aircraft.” Moments after the picture comes into focus, there is an explosion, a ball of fire, a gaping hole. Great confusion. The commentator, all his cool composure gone, says that a second plane has hit the South tower.

As I stand in front of the television, stunned, my husband hurriedly puts on a suit, as he does every morning. Today, there is more urgency. All hands on deck. He is on his way to work at the Federal Building. I remember a morning three years ago, in our apartment on 85th Street and Central Park West in New York City. On the television, footage of American embassies gutted in Kenya and Tanzania. That morning, I grieved for the hundreds of victims of a calculated mass murder that would turn out to be Osama Bin Laden’s handiwork. But then–still clinging to a stubborn sense of security that Americans tend to take as an inalienable right–I did not fear for our country. Today, I do.

The news is frustratingly sketchy. Four planes are missing. They are not all accounted for. They were bound for the West Coast.

I think of all the men and women who said good-bye to their spouses this morning before heading to work at the World Trade Center. Perhaps they had an argument. Perhaps they were too busy to share a quick kiss. Perhaps their children were still sleeping when they left home. I think of tourist families who argued about which site to take in first–the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, or the World Trade Center?

At the door, I hold on to my husband. A minute later, from the third-floor window of our apartment at 17th and Diamond, I watch him get into his car. Just as he pulls away, I shout down to him, “They’ve hit the Pentagon.”

I call our friend Pio, who live seven blocks from the World Trade Center. No answer. I call his office, but a recorded voice comes over the line: “All circuits are busy.” That eerily calm voice, recorded in better times, turns my blood cold.

My sister calls from Japan, crying. “What’s happening there?” she says. Japanese television is reporting eleven hijacked planes–which later turns out to be a misinterpretation of American Flight 11–but at the moment I am envisioning eleven planes full of panicked passengers, eleven unknown targets, a wide swath of disasters unfurling across the country.

Announcements begin rolling across the screen, beneath footage of the ravaged buildings, bodies falling, people running. The Transamerica building: closed. All U.S. domestic flights: grounded. All tunnels and bridges into New York City: closed. Government buildings across the country: closed.

I call my husband at the Federal Building. “It’s not safe,” I say.

“The place is swarming with security,” he assures me.

“There’s no security against a plane.”

In the foreground of the footage stands the Empire State Building, where I used to work. Once dwarfed by the World Trade Center, it suddenly looks immense, infallible against the backdrop of the two burning buildings. And then: the collapse. A descending mushroom of thick gray smoke. The cloud of dust billowing behind a crowd of running people. They are young and old. They are wearing suits, carrying briefcases, holding on to each other, stumbling. Their faces are every color and of every origin. Gradually they all take on the same gray-pink color, and in the footage they are wandering, dazed, flashes of white skin or black skin or brown skin showing through the ashen dust that covers them.

It is a gorgeous, sunny day in San Francisco. The sky is extraordinarily blue. The streets are strangely quiet. I wander up Castro Street, feeling as if I have stumbled into an unfamiliar city, a stage set of my neighborhood; the props are here, but most of the actors have gone home, and those who remain are barely speaking. Everyone looks struck by sorrow. In the air, an absence: not a single plane. The Coast Guard is patrolling San Francisco Bay. The borders with Mexico and Canada have been closed. Also closed: Disneyland. Mt. Rushmore. The Liberty Bell. Yankee Stadium.

My friend Pio calls. He’s okay. His office and apartment have been evacuated. He’s staying with a friend. In the background, a baby’s cry, the wail of sirens–sounds I’ve never associated with Pio, who wears about him an air of absolute calm. For the first time I remember, he sounds shaken, “The whole sky is gray,” he says. “The skyline looks so empty.”

At 2:00 in the afternoon, I realize that I have been watching television for seven and a half hours. I remember another television marathon in 1991, when then-President George Bush declared war against Iraq. My boyfriend at the time was in Saudi Arabia, and I skipped classes for a week to watch our first 24-hour television war. The war was swift. Victory seemed inevitable. The footage on TV was of square white buildings hit with such precision that the structures on either side of them remained intact–the common military memory of a psychologically pampered generation. Born in 1970, I was too young to feel the nausea of Vietnam or the terror of the Cold War in its worst moments. My generation came of age with Reagan-era egos, an unyielding faith in the promise of eternal riches, a belief in our ultimate safety and America’s invincibility.

Most of my American-born students at City College of San Francisco have only the vaguest memories of the Gulf War. Their war diet, until now, has come from Hollywood: larger-than-life American heroes battling enemies of every ilk–and always, in the end, victorious. But a few of my students came to America to flee war, emigrants from one of the many countries where war is a daily terror. One young woman told me that she endured a decade of civil war in El Salvador before leaving her family behind to pursue a more prosperous and secure life in America. “I had just begun to feel safe here,” she will tell me a few days after the attacks. “I don’t anymore.”

Today, children are interviewed at a school near what used to be the World Trade Center. Used to be–the phrase feels impossible on the tongue. Taking cues from the adults around them, the children are largely silent, looking around in disbelief, clinging to their backpacks. A freckled boy of seven says, “Some kids are worried because their parents worked at the World Trade Center.” Worked, past tense. The unintentionally accurate grammar of a child. As an adult, I can only imagine the images that will haunt these children in coming months, as they go about the daily business of school, soccer practice, slumber parties, bedtime.

Early on the morning of September 12, I awake in terror as a roar rips through the silence. My first thought: a plane. No planes should be flying yet. I rush to the window, shaking off the numbness of sleep, and realize that it was only a motorcycle.

View a photo gallery of Bay Area victims of the September 11 attacks here.

Family members and friends of many of those who died on September 11 set up foundations and scholarships to honor their loved ones. Here are links to some of the foundations honoring victims with Bay Area ties:

Brent Woodall Foundation for Exceptional Kids

Captain Jason Dahl Scholarship Fund

Tom Burnett Foundation

Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas Foundation

Patrick J. Quigley IV Memorial Scholarship

Wanda Green Scholarship
Betty Ong Foundation

Melissa Harrington Hughes Memorial Fund

Nicole Miller Scholarship Fund

Naomi Solomon Memorial Fund