9-11 remembered

September 11 changed my life in more ways than I thought possible–I have a hard time believing it’s been so long ago.

You have to have lived in New York to understand the World Trade Center’s part in it. It was one of my favorite places–even though I thought it graceless and ugly, architecturally–because it was in the heart of things. Journalists like me were always getting invitations to eat in the restaurant on top.

WTC meeting rooms–where they held the press conferences–had floor-to-ceiling windows kinda shaped like shoebox lids, so that if you squeezed against the window you were actually standing on a glass floor. I’d do that, then look out and down–it felt as if I stood on air, as high up as an airplane. If I turned quickly, I could see the PR people rolling their eyes–”there she goes again” before they politely suggested that we go look at the product they were pitching.

After, if it was an evening meeting, we’d come down the multiple elevators, head out onto the plaza and I’d linger there, people watching. It was one of the best places outside of Times Square to get into the characters that stalk New York streets.

WTC was imposing, it was massive, it would be found largely intact in a million years. Like the pyramids.

That was why I thought my boss was joking when he called the morning of September 11. I’d stayed home to catch up on paperwork. “Cynthia, in view of what’s happened, I’m going to send your teams home. Is that OK with you?”

I worked at a dot-com and we’d already had a bunch of layoffs, so my first thought was ‘damn, not again.’ “Why? Don’t tell me I’ve gotta lay off someone else.”

“No, no. Terrorists attacked New York this morning and the World Trade Center collapsed. We’re all in shock, and no one’s getting any work done, so I thought you’d want them to go home.”

My boss had played one too many deadpan pranks to get away with this one, so I laughed. “Peter, I’ve WORKED in the World Trade Center. Don’t be silly. Is this a joke?”

“No, I’m telling you, the World Trade Center is gone.”

“Yeah, right. Peter, did you need something else?”

“Look, Cynthia, just turn on the damn TV. OK?”

“What channel?”

“ANY @#$*)@#$ channel! Just do it, OK?”

And that was my introduction to 9-11. I sat at home, in my bathrobe, numbly watching TV. I had friends who worked in the WTC. Where were they? The Pentagon was hit–I had friends in the Pentagon. Where were they? My sister, close friends, they all lived near the Pentagon. Were they OK?

I lived in the main flightpath of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. The air was NEVER silent at my house. I’d grown used to the roar of jets overhead but now I hit the mute button on the television and listened. Total silence–not a plane in the sky. That night a military jet flew by and sent the neighborhood into a panic.

The next day the local news told of three girls who’d decided to ditch high school on 9-11 and drive to the Mall of America. They got there around noon and the doors were locked. They went round the buildings–not an easy task–pounding on doors until the lone security guard opened one and told them to go away, that the world was coming to an end.

Of course, the schools had sent the students home, and the girls’ parents had been frantically searching for them for hours, so I suppose they were grounded for life.

In the days to come I helped set up volunteer teams of tech professionals to help with emergency network setup and anything else they could, tracked down loved ones (and, horribly, discovered who among our friends was gone), snarled at the man who called to complain that his e-mail blasts hadn’t gone out to prospective customers on September 12, and tried to make sense of the confusion. The company founder gave a lunchtime service remembering those we’d lost–first time I’d ever cried in a business setting–and we got on with life.

Life didn’t always get on with us–advertising revenue tanked, the company’s already-tricky finances got positively tottery, and we knew our jobs were going to go away. The tech and business publishing industries took a nosedive and I turned to a second love–marketing and PR–which I turned out to be pretty good at.

I also decided that it was time to stop taking chances, get a stable, long-term job I could retire with, build retirement equity, and start really thinking about my future. I started taking my glasswork seriously, began doing photography in earnest…and took my first-ever job with a multinational corporation (OK, so that one was a mistake). Moved out west, bought a house, settled in and built a studio. Surrounded myself with family, made friends, got involved in the community.

As one friend said, “9-11 taught me that my career comes second. Or third.” She worked in DC, lived near the Pentagon, husband worked at Johns Hopkins in Maryland. When the planes struck she was trapped in the city, and spent the next six hours wondering if her family was alive or dead.

She’d had one of the best jobs a journalist could hope for, running a well-respected newsroom, but she walked away without a second glance. Took a job with less pay (and a lot less prestige) so she could work from home and stay near her kids.

Before 9-11 I would have thought she was crazy. Now I get it, in spades.

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