9/11

Today is the 10th anniversary of 9/11. We spent the morning in church reflecting on the fact that that day showed the very worst and the very best of humanity. From the most evil atrocity, heroes emerged. We were asked to turn to the person sitting next to us and recount our memories of that day. These are my memories...

I was driving to work at Grace Lutheran. Alex was 17 months old. It was the first truly cool day of the season and he was wearing a new plaid jacket. I remember hearing the radio report that a plane had crashed into the first tower. I was in front of Jennings Osborne's home on Cantrell. I knew Russ was still at home getting ready for work, so I called to tell him the news. In my mind it was a small plane...an accident. When Russ picked up, he told me he was watching it on The Today Show and it appeared to be a commercial plane.

As I pulled into the parking lot at work, Russ called back to tell me that a second plane had hit the second tower. This was not an accident. We were under attack. I walked into work and everyone was speaking in hushed tones so as to not upset the children. Our director kept running upstairs to the church office to watch the news and come downstairs to report to us. We were having our morning snack when she walked off the elevator and announced that the first tower had fallen.

The larger buildings in Little Rock, including Russ' office on Financial Center Parkway, were evacuated for the day due to possible terror threats. This meant many of our parents were arriving to pick their children up early. Many parents simply chose to leave work and pick up their kids...you had a sense of wanting to keep the ones you loved close. I was so thankful to have Alex at work with me. As the parents drifted in and out of the school, they provided us with news reports of the plane hitting the Pentagon and of Flight 93.

I did not see the actual images of that day until I arrived home around 4:30 p.m. It was surreal to literally see the images that had been described to me all day. While all were disturbing, I remember watching the debris cloud engulfing the people running down the street...I remember thinking, "This doesn't happen in America." But it did.

My dad was in Little Rock on business and had planned to spend the night with us that evening. I remember us eating catfish take-out from Cock of the Walk while continuing to watch the coverage. Then, I remember us shutting off the TV and taking Alex to Lake Willastein to clear our heads. Again, another surreal moment was the stillness in the air. No planes. Everything had been grounded. Living so close to the air base, the buzz of planes is almost a guarantee in Maumelle. Not that night. I also remember watching 3 little boys run up and down the bunker next to the playground. They were around 7 or 8 years old. One said, "I know! Let's play World Trade Center." I remember thinking that they didn't understand and that this wasn't a game. It was our life, our world and it would never be the same.

Russ' memories from 9/11: I don't remember alot of details about what I was wearing etc, but I do remember waking up to a beautiful cool morning. After Aimee and Alex had left the house, I was finishing breakfast and was about to leave for work. The Today Show is usually an hour behind but the station cut to a live shot of the first tower on fire. My first thought was that the fire would be VERY hard to fight that high up and that it would take a while to rebuild and repair the building. Al Roker mentioned that even though it looked like the tower was leaning, both towers were built to withstand hurricane force winds (reassuring us that it was not going to fall over). The station pulled in on a tight shot of the burning tower when another explosion occurred. I thought perhaps something inside the first tower has exploded. A woman who was reporting to Matt and Katie said another plane had hit. The station rewound another angle and it showed the second plane fly in. At that point I STILL could not grasp that this was intentional. It wasn't until the NBC Pentagon correspondant came on and said, "I don't want to alarm anybody but the building just shook and people are running away." The next shot was of the Pentagon on fire. THAT is when I realized that we were at war. By that time, I had called my office. We were being evacuated because our building housed some federal agencies. After watching for a few more minutes, I went to the bathroom to wash my face and change clothes. When I went back to the tv, the first tower collapsed and I broke down for the first time that day. I watched the coverage all day.

When Aimee and Alex got home we eventually went for a walk. It was still a beautiful day outside but it was VERY quiet. There were no contrails in the sky and no air traffic at all. It was erie. Later that night I got up to get a drink of water and I turned on the tv. I think I did so because I wanted to make sure the events from the day were real. The tv showed a scene from Ground Zero with flood lights on the skeleton of the towers and volunteers looking for survivors. It was surreal. The next morning I looked through a file with some business cards. I had called someone in one of the WTC buildings a few months before who had worked on an earthquake project with my company. I found his card and the address was #2 WTC. For a while I had no idea if he had survived or not. I later found out that he had been killed. Michael Lomax worked at Aon Re. The company had offices close to the top of WTC #2. Apparently he had evacuated but was told like many other people to return to his office. He was above the impact zone when the 2nd plane hit and was not able to make it out.