Where Were You Nine Years Ago Today?

[Gayla]

This seems to be the recurring theme today on most of the sites I visit. Figured it would be a good one to have here, too. So where were you?

This is a copy of my "Where I Was" story from a blog post.

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Nine year's ago today, I was a couple of hours into a night shift at my job. It was a quiet, uneventful and completely forgetable kind of night. At the end of my shift, I headed home. Got the girls ready for school and on the bus. Cleaned up the kitchen, started the dishwasher and headed to bed.

An hour later, my partner threw open the bedroom door and woke me out of a sound sleep saying something about how the country was under attack. Not really understanding what she was talking about, I reached over for the remote and turned the TV on just in time to see the second tower hit.

I got up and we went back to the living room and just sat there, quietly, holding hands as we watched the events of that morning unfold. I will never forgot how quiet it was in our house that morning. There was no traffic on the street or neighbors stopping by for coffee. Even the dogs were laying quietly on the living room floor.

Shortly after the towers fell, she decided to go get the girls out of school. I turned the computers on and found one local NYC station that was streaming live on the Web. I think I had CNN streaming on the other computer and we had one of the networks on the TV.

I left the house once in the next week. It was that same morning. After Cindy got the girls home from school, we realized that we were out of milk. I walked out to the garage to get in the truck to go to the store and I saw our American flag sitting on a shelf in the corner of the garage. We put that flag up for 4th of July and maybe Memorial Day if I remembered to do it, but other than that, it just stayed on that shelf. I took it down, shook it out a little and stuck it in the holder on the corner of the house. I don't think there was much of a breeze that day but I swear it waved in the wind.

As I drove through our neighborhood, I noticed a number of flags already flying. I also noticed that the streets were empty. When I pulled up at our little corner store, the front door was open but I was the only customer. The woman behind the counter, Dee, whom I saw most every day when I stopped for coffee or a newspaper or a lottery ticket, was sitting on a stool watching a little black and white TV. I grabbed a gallon of milk out of the cooler and walked back up to the counter.

I asked her why she was even open today and she said that if she didn't keep the store open she would just be at home, by herself, watching TV. She didn't want to be alone. I paid for my milk and told to come over when she closed the store later that day.

Turns out we knew a few folks that didn't want to be alone and by early evening we had a half dozen or so friends and family sitting in our living room. There wasn't much talking. There was a good bit of crying. And there was a lot of hugging and hand holding.

For the next week, I barely tore myself away from the TV. Like most everyone else, I didn't really know what this meant for our country, for my family, for me. I couldn't imagine things ever being normal again. I wasn't sure a day would come where I would turn the TV off and go back to an ordinary life, much less do something like get on an airplane.

But things did get back to normal in some ways. There were jobs to go to and kids to raise and grass to mow and all those ordinary things that come with an ordinary life. Nine years later, it's more ordinary then ever. The job is different and the kids don't need help getting on the bus anymore. The grass still grows. The politicians are still arguing with each other and the preachers are still preaching their versions of the right word.

And that flag is still waving in the wind out there on the corner of the house.