Do you remember where you were and what you were doing on Monday night, September 10, 2001? I recall a very enchanting evening with my wife. The beautiful, silky day slipped through our fingers all too quickly. We concluded our summer vacation at one of the most beautiful beaches in the world—our world, anyway.
And so the evening began in that bitter-sweet moment when a very precious time ends, our vacation, but a new reality calls us to the promise of more-of-the-same, only better. We decided to stop by my office to check mail, water plants, and top off the trip home by enjoying a glass of cabernet at the restaurant beside my office.
I suggested to Deborah, my wife, that we ease into the return of our busy lives with this treat to honor the wonderful vacation we had enjoyed. She quickly agreed, already bracing herself for the rigorous program year ahead with the stress she shouldered as a symphonic cellist who had to prepare and perform a new program each week, with special rehearsals for the holiday seasons. Of course, she looked forward to the grueling work which she also dreaded. There, that evening as she relaxed in the tensions of opposites that composed so much of her life, we chatted about our past and the future that we anticipated with the genial anticipation that all of us experience at the end of our vacations and a return to normal.
A "return to normal" ... We could never have anticipated that the evening would be our last "normal." We lingered with our wine, we laughed, relaxed, relived the grand moments on the beach we loved so much—the walks, the moonlit nights of skinny-dipping, the love-making, the collecting of shells, the greeting of other beachcombers we had never met before and would never see again, but people like us, our "beach family."
Each of these precious moments lingered in our minds as we lingered with our wine. Deborah looked so relaxed and lovely, sitting at the outside table of the restaurant, under dim lights and stars emerging in the gathering darkness. But then came a very subtle, but distinct shift in the mood. Deborah became quiet, pensive-like, and I knew she was gathering her thoughts. Was it a dread of yet again preparing herself for another demanding performance of Beethoven's Ninth?! No, something else. Finally she said, "I feel as if something bad is going to happen." "Like what?," I asked. "I don't know," she responded, "and I don't want to end our evening and vacation with a downer. It's probably nothing."
But the moment arrived with somber tone and a quiet uncertainty. We felt it. "Something is in the air," we may say at such times. We do not know how our minds work to pass along an undisclosed image, sensation, thought, or feeling. But I shall never forget that particular moment -- the laughter, the fun, the glass of wine, the enchantment, and then the indescribable foreboding unknown. So ended the enchantment.
Meanwhile, 847 miles from where we sat at that restaurant, two planes would be boarded the next morning, Flight 11 headed to Los Angeles, and Flight 175 also headed to LA. Only 727.7 air miles away, the planes boarded probably with sleeping but expectant passengers looking forward to a nap while their Boeing 767 jets nestled them in its wings, in preparation for the next business day or vacation days such as Deborah and I had previously enjoyed and relived under the romantic lights of the first evening back home.
And so it was that the two jets hurdled toward a fateful crash we have come to refer to as "9/11" and the first act of terrorism that penetrated what we had taken to be the impenetrable shield of our country's "isolation." Adrift with secure boundaries east and west, the great Atlantic and Pacific oceans, to our north the friendly Canadians whose border we could regularly criss-cross with appropriate political hospitality, and to our south, other friendly neighbors in Mexico, where we might hospitably shop and sightsee, we could rest easy. Ah, so assured we were that nothing short of a nuclear rocket would penetrate the friendly skies above our heads. And, thankfully and mercifully, President Reagan and President Mikhail Gorbachev undertook courageous and wise steps to foster positive relationships as the Cold War wound down and the old USSR continued to dissolve.
Also, a particular source of confidence was our seeming mastery of all that we had come to associate with modernism. Engineering, technology, a free-wheeling capitalism, free markets except for any we might want or need to control, the rejection of old traditions, the optimism of politics and economics regulated with a thriving marketing economy—all of this we had mastered in euphoric triumph of modernism that had cast off old ways and looked for more development and progress. After all, here in New York, in what was named the World Trade Center, we showed the world its tallest building in the North and South towers, completed in 1973.
And so it was that on the morning of "9/11," I left my house just before 9 AM, and turned on my car radio to enjoy our warm and friendly radio show, Charlotte Talks. But immediately I was told that regular programming would be suspended for national news. In what must have been a freak accident, the announcer declared, a jet had collided with a tower in the World Trade Center. More news flooded the local station with details. At 8:46 AM, flight 11 from Boston crashed into floors 93-99 of the North Tower. But wait, there was another crash at 9:03 AM as flight 175 from Boston crashed into floors 77-85.
All hell, literally, was unfurled. Shock and fear flooded our news outlets and our bodies as well as our minds and souls. This was no accident; clearly we had been attacked. Yes, the improbable if not the impossible had happened. The two towers collapsed. But it was not just the two towers that collapsed. No, the "9/11" story is that the crash of the towers signaled something more significant—the collapse of modernism.
Actually, two other flights crashed that day. The third plane struck our Pentagon, and the fourth plane crashed in a Pennsylvania rural field. But before the day ended, the attacks killed 2,977 people and 19 al-Qaeda terrorists, making it the deadliest terrorist attacking history, planned by Osama bin Laden, who had become leader of what would later carry the name of al-Qaeda, ("the base"), a militant organization that declared a holy war against the United States.
Since that national trauma, we have been adrift. Fundamentalist religion challenged politics, politics challenged democratic institutions, and courage caves today in the face of money and power while our enchanting world slips into memory and waits—because dreams never die.
And so the evening began in that bitter-sweet moment when a very precious time ends, our vacation, but a new reality calls us to the promise of more-of-the-same, only better. We decided to stop by my office to check mail, water plants, and top off the trip home by enjoying a glass of cabernet at the restaurant beside my office.
I suggested to Deborah, my wife, that we ease into the return of our busy lives with this treat to honor the wonderful vacation we had enjoyed. She quickly agreed, already bracing herself for the rigorous program year ahead with the stress she shouldered as a symphonic cellist who had to prepare and perform a new program each week, with special rehearsals for the holiday seasons. Of course, she looked forward to the grueling work which she also dreaded. There, that evening as she relaxed in the tensions of opposites that composed so much of her life, we chatted about our past and the future that we anticipated with the genial anticipation that all of us experience at the end of our vacations and a return to normal.
A "return to normal" ... We could never have anticipated that the evening would be our last "normal." We lingered with our wine, we laughed, relaxed, relived the grand moments on the beach we loved so much—the walks, the moonlit nights of skinny-dipping, the love-making, the collecting of shells, the greeting of other beachcombers we had never met before and would never see again, but people like us, our "beach family."
Each of these precious moments lingered in our minds as we lingered with our wine. Deborah looked so relaxed and lovely, sitting at the outside table of the restaurant, under dim lights and stars emerging in the gathering darkness. But then came a very subtle, but distinct shift in the mood. Deborah became quiet, pensive-like, and I knew she was gathering her thoughts. Was it a dread of yet again preparing herself for another demanding performance of Beethoven's Ninth?! No, something else. Finally she said, "I feel as if something bad is going to happen." "Like what?," I asked. "I don't know," she responded, "and I don't want to end our evening and vacation with a downer. It's probably nothing."
But the moment arrived with somber tone and a quiet uncertainty. We felt it. "Something is in the air," we may say at such times. We do not know how our minds work to pass along an undisclosed image, sensation, thought, or feeling. But I shall never forget that particular moment -- the laughter, the fun, the glass of wine, the enchantment, and then the indescribable foreboding unknown. So ended the enchantment.
Meanwhile, 847 miles from where we sat at that restaurant, two planes would be boarded the next morning, Flight 11 headed to Los Angeles, and Flight 175 also headed to LA. Only 727.7 air miles away, the planes boarded probably with sleeping but expectant passengers looking forward to a nap while their Boeing 767 jets nestled them in its wings, in preparation for the next business day or vacation days such as Deborah and I had previously enjoyed and relived under the romantic lights of the first evening back home.
And so it was that the two jets hurdled toward a fateful crash we have come to refer to as "9/11" and the first act of terrorism that penetrated what we had taken to be the impenetrable shield of our country's "isolation." Adrift with secure boundaries east and west, the great Atlantic and Pacific oceans, to our north the friendly Canadians whose border we could regularly criss-cross with appropriate political hospitality, and to our south, other friendly neighbors in Mexico, where we might hospitably shop and sightsee, we could rest easy. Ah, so assured we were that nothing short of a nuclear rocket would penetrate the friendly skies above our heads. And, thankfully and mercifully, President Reagan and President Mikhail Gorbachev undertook courageous and wise steps to foster positive relationships as the Cold War wound down and the old USSR continued to dissolve.
Also, a particular source of confidence was our seeming mastery of all that we had come to associate with modernism. Engineering, technology, a free-wheeling capitalism, free markets except for any we might want or need to control, the rejection of old traditions, the optimism of politics and economics regulated with a thriving marketing economy—all of this we had mastered in euphoric triumph of modernism that had cast off old ways and looked for more development and progress. After all, here in New York, in what was named the World Trade Center, we showed the world its tallest building in the North and South towers, completed in 1973.
And so it was that on the morning of "9/11," I left my house just before 9 AM, and turned on my car radio to enjoy our warm and friendly radio show, Charlotte Talks. But immediately I was told that regular programming would be suspended for national news. In what must have been a freak accident, the announcer declared, a jet had collided with a tower in the World Trade Center. More news flooded the local station with details. At 8:46 AM, flight 11 from Boston crashed into floors 93-99 of the North Tower. But wait, there was another crash at 9:03 AM as flight 175 from Boston crashed into floors 77-85.
All hell, literally, was unfurled. Shock and fear flooded our news outlets and our bodies as well as our minds and souls. This was no accident; clearly we had been attacked. Yes, the improbable if not the impossible had happened. The two towers collapsed. But it was not just the two towers that collapsed. No, the "9/11" story is that the crash of the towers signaled something more significant—the collapse of modernism.
Actually, two other flights crashed that day. The third plane struck our Pentagon, and the fourth plane crashed in a Pennsylvania rural field. But before the day ended, the attacks killed 2,977 people and 19 al-Qaeda terrorists, making it the deadliest terrorist attacking history, planned by Osama bin Laden, who had become leader of what would later carry the name of al-Qaeda, ("the base"), a militant organization that declared a holy war against the United States.
Since that national trauma, we have been adrift. Fundamentalist religion challenged politics, politics challenged democratic institutions, and courage caves today in the face of money and power while our enchanting world slips into memory and waits—because dreams never die.
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