The Day Before Fear

[Grouch]

From the distance of a week, I look back on Sept. 10 and wonder what I was doing, what petty concerns ruled my mind that day. It seems like a year ago, another lifetime, a different world.

That Monday, I was fretting about finding time to write several book reviews which had been crowding the space in my head; there was a pile of office supplies junked up in one corner which needed to be organized—printers and monitors and other detritus of my 9-to-5 life; I was desperately searching for an agent to represent the novel I’d finished writing two years ago and had let gather dust since then. Laundry needed to be picked up, my car needed a good washing, the lawn could stand to be mowed. On that day before fear entered our lives, I was busy sweating the small stuff, the trivial, the mundane, the selfish.

I cannot remember exactly what I was doing on Sept. 10, that’s how ordinary those 24 hours were. I’m sure that Monday was just like all the other 364 days stacked up behind it, each one an instance of taking things for granted.

Mail was delivered, right on schedule, Hollywood movies “entertained” us with computer-generated explosions, Congressman Gary Condit was big news, proposed cuts to social security were even bigger news, and planes flew overhead in a regular criss-cross pattern. If you’re like me, you didn’t even so much as flinch when you heard a jet engine.

But all that was before the day of fear. Sept. 11, 2001 is now our demarcation line. Every single American has marked that date in their mind and will forever categorize things as before or after the day of fear. An older generation once did the same thing—on one side, there was everything that happened on Dec. 6, 1941 and before; on the other side, there was life measured by post-Day of Infamy standards.

I was barely six months old when Kennedy was assassinated and I didn’t own a television when the Challenger space shuttle exploded (I only found out about it a day later), so I can’t tell you where I was for those two events. But I can tell you exactly what I was doing the morning of Sept. 11.

My wife and I had gotten up late—around 6:20 (Alaska Time)—and were bumping into each other in the kitchen as we made sandwiches for our kids’ school lunches. As per routine, we begged them to eat a few bites of breakfast before they caught the school bus. It was a typical Tuesday morning. In those last few seconds of normalcy, the most important thing on my mind was making sure I spread mayonnaise all the way to the edges of the bread, just the way my kids like it.

The phone rang.

My wife answered and my mother-in-law said, “Turn on the TV.”

From the other room, I heard my wife cry out, “Hon! Come quick! They’ve crashed planes into the World Trade Center!” Then, a few seconds later, “Oh my God! The Pentagon, too!”

Even as I walked out to the living room and watched those Hollywood-ish images on TV, my mind was already dividing life into two parts: Before and After.

The true horror of the attack, however, didn’t stab me until later that day when I was standing in my colleague’s office watching the television sets he had tuned to different stations. One network started broadcasting footage captured by a cameraman filming the smoking hole in the first skyscraper as the second plane hit.

These are the indelible images I saw: A bright New York morning. Postcard weather. The two towers loom overhead, one spewing smoke from a jagged hole in its side. Just then, a plane comes across the screen, left to right, and melts into the side of the tower. Melts. There is no other word for it. The Boeing 767 is like a knife going into a tall stick of butter. It disappears completely into the building and doesn’t come out the other side.

More than 3,350 miles away in Alaska, I clap my hand to my mouth, shoving the “Oh my God!” back into my throat. There can be no words to describe this deliberate evil.

The sight of that plane, so low overhead, slicing into the sleek steel skin of Tower 2—that’s the moment I’ll always recall when they ask me, “Where were you when…?”

Pontificating newscasters have been frequently chanting one phrase this past week: “The world will never be the same again.” They’re right. We lost something the morning of Sept. 11: not just more than 5,000 lives in one swift crush of concrete and metal, but the carefree attitude of what we once thought was normalcy. We will never return to the world of petty worries, the taken-for-granted, the I’ll-get-to-it-later. Suddenly, life has become incredibly precious and fragile. I, for one, will always be haunted by planes melting into buildings.