September 11: Our Thoughts and Memories

September 11 is also our Wedding Anniversary

Issue #134 Memories September 11, 2022

Twenty-one years ago, the United States experienced the most deadly foreign attack on our country in our history.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, similar to what President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared in 1941, a day “...that will live in infamy.”

September 11, 2001, was also our third wedding anniversary.

Just as people of our age remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, as well as the other assassinations in the 1960s, we remember where we were when America was attacked from outside our borders.

For us, the day started out just like any other Tuesday except that it was also Primary Election Day in Michigan and we had a new polling location. Keith went to the pool at the Y, and I walked the four miles to our new polling place and back.

I had the TV on in the background with closed captioning enabled as I prepared for my day in my home office. Out of the corner of my eye, it looked like there was an office fire in one of the towers of the Renaissance Center in Detroit. Then I saw on the closed captioning that Peter Jennings of ABC News was reporting.

I remember thinking to myself, “Why is Peter Jennings reporting on an office fire in Detroit?”

That’s when Keith, coming back from his swimming workout, burst into my office exclaiming: “A plane just hit the World Trade Center in New York City!”

I said, “How could a pilot not see the World Trade Center?”

That’s when the 2nd plane hit, and shortly after, the 3rd plane hit thePentagon, and the 4th went down in Pennsylvania. By then we knew it was a terrorist attack. We later learned that the 4th plane was brought down deliberately by some of the passengers on that flight because they found out it was on its way to destroy the White House. They were the true patriots that day. Today’s domestic terrorists and wanna-be insurrectionists are NOT “patriots.”

As the day went on, no one was sure what was happening or even if we would continue to be attacked in other locations in the country.

Here in the Detroit Metro area, we have more people from the Middle East than almost anywhere else in the United States. Those of us who are not Islamophobic knew that no other Muslims except those Al Qaeda members and those pilots were responsible, but still, everyone here was very nervous and scared.

My 81-year-old father was at home and my 77-year-old mother was working at a polling place. I called Daddy to make sure he was alright and then drove to see my mother.

Back then, most people did not have cell phones and tablets with always-on internet access like we do today.

I told my mother what was happening and, of course, just like her, she said she’d stay where she was.

Keith and I canceled our plans to eat out later in the day, and while I was out, I just bought some food and, like everyone else, we stayed home glued to the TV.

I remember feeling “bummed” that this horrible event happened on our anniversary. Selfish and self-serving, of course, but that day many different thoughts were going through our minds, and a lot of those thoughts didn’t make sense in retrospect.

My eldest daughter was also out of the country on that day, attending a writers’ workshop in Amsterdam. The group was supposed to return on Wednesday. My younger daughter, who was living in D.C. at the time, had gone to NYC to feed her sister’s cats and water the plants, and she was on the train heading back to D.C. as the planes hit. She got back safely.

I was so worried about my eldest daughter as all plane travel was immediately halted. I had the phone number of the hotel in Amsterdam where she had been staying and I called there on Wednesday morning. The receptionist answered in Dutch of course, but soon as I said, “I’m calling from America...” she immediately switched to perfect English.

She told me that my daughter’s group had left the hotel, but she didn’t know where they went. My younger daughter told me not to worry, her sister would find a way to email us.

She was right. Later on Wednesday, my daughter found an internet café somewhere in Amsterdam and let us know she was OK and the group was staying somewhere else until they could get a flight home soon. When she was finally able to fly home the following Sunday, she found out that one of her friends who worked in Tower One and his daughter who was in daycare in the same building were killed.

By Thursday we were still glued to the 24/7 TV coverage and heard the Coldstream guards at Buckingham Palace, at the request of Queen Elizabeth II and for the first time in 600 years, played something other than British national songs. When the guard band played the U.S. National Anthem, I broke down in tears.

I was still upset that our 3rd wedding anniversary had been marred by these events when I saw a Black man about our age walking back and forth in front of the Pentagon, which had also been hit two days prior. I found out from the news commentators that Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was the 25th wedding anniversary for him and his wife who worked at the Pentagon and was killed. They had planned a big party at their home when she got home from work, but she never came home again.

Even now, more than two decades later, I can’t get the image of that heartbroken man out of my mind, and I have never felt bummed about 9/11 happening on our 3rd anniversary ever again since that time.

So every year, September 11 is both a happy day and a sad day for Keith and me.

Today we will celebrate our anniversary and prepare for our anniversary vacation while also honoring those who were lost in 2001 and will never have the chance to celebrate anything in their lives ever again.