Ten Years Ago

I went to bed on the night of September 10, 2001, with Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad on my bedside table, and all night long the idea of 40,000 dead on the first day of the city's bombardment rattled around inside my head.

My wife woke up in the morning from a terrible dream. Something really bad was happening, she said, but in the car, listening to the radio on our commute to work, we found out that nothing bad was happening yet.

I didn't have class that morning, so I sat at a table at Cafe le France in Bristol, Rhode Island, grading papers. I overheard someone nearby saying that a plane had smashed into the World Trade Center. My first thought was that one of the more extreme types I had worked with at the natural foods co-op a few years ago had become completely unhinged and, enraged with capitalist exploitation, rammed a little Cessna into the epicenter of world finance. Before long, I found out I was wrong.

I sat in the car all the rest of the morning, listening to the news as, step by step, events unfolded and were reported. New York was 195 miles away by highway, closer as the crow flies. It seemed very close. Classes were cancelled, and we drove home, glued ourselves to the television. In days to come, I would talk with students who had family and friends in Manhattan or at the Pentagon. One student's brother worked in the World Trade Center. He survived the assault, but spent the next few days wandering the city in a daze. It was several days before he checked in with his family. They all thought he was dead.

I remember driving past New York on the way to DC, later in the month, at night, seeing lights shining all over the site. I don't know if we could legitimately see smoke and dust from I-95, but it seemed like we could, and I remember it that way, see it in my mind's eye that way. On subsequent visits to the city over the next couple of years, we stayed away from the site. We felt that we had studied it enough via television, radio, the papers.

Washington, DC, was full of helicopters. We were planning a move there and visited often. The morning after we moved into our apartment on Columbia Road, in June of 2002, was a Sunday morning that started off quietly enough. I was in the shower when screaming and shouting erupted outside. I ran to the window dressed in a towel, looked down to see hordes of soccer fans out on the streets waving the Brazilian flag. Brazil had just won the World Cup, I found out later that morning. Thankfully, it was the closest I came to being a victim of terrorism. It was much later, 2003, I think, when I noticed one day that the helicopters that had been ubiquitous were gone. They had been a part of life for a while, but then they went away.

I still think about Stalingrad, and I think about that morning when everything changed, but then it didn't.