Wandering Aimlessly

I wasn't blogging yet this time last year, and even though I remember it so vividly I don't think I could ever forget, this is something I want to have.

The day started out like any other Tuesday had that semester: I got up, skimmed the rest of the reading for my Speech Com 213, Persuasion and the Arts class. I took a shower and went back into my room to dry my hair. I had MTV on. In the middle of drying my hair, Sarah came flying down the stairs and into my room saying "Oh my gosh, I just heard on the radio that a plane just ran into the World Trade Center! Can I turn on the Today Show to see if they're talking about it?"

We stood and watched in disbelief as they replayed the plan crashing into the side of the building over, and over, and over. It was an air traffic control mistake. A horrible, awful mistake. As Katie Couric and Matt Lauer and Sarah and I tried to make sense of it all, it happened again. A second plane struck the other tower of the World Trade Center. It was slowly dawning on us that this couldn't be a mistake. It wasn't possible for TWO planes to be so off their course they ran into a building -- the same building -- twice in a span of only a few minutes.

Disbelief and a lot of questions followed. Some of those questions were whether or not to go to class, because the events happened less than a half-hour before I was supposed to be sitting in Room 130 in Lincoln Hall. I borrowed Shelley's Walkman to listen to the radio as I walked numbly to the quad. The strangest part of it all was that more than half of the people out at that time had no idea. No idea at all that our country was under some kind of attack.

Shock was on the faces of the few students who had arrived before me, as we all asked each other if you'd heard, what you thought was happening. Students began arriving who hadn't had their television or radio on before class, and we solemnly updated them. By the time Professor Hayes showed up, the class was quiet. He said a few words about what had happened, and then told us that the department was not cancelling classes. We watched Sex and the City in class that day.

By the time I was walking home, headphones firmly clamped over my ears, there were fires at the Pentagon and one of the towers had collapsed. Another plane had gone down in Pennsylvania. Back at 711 Elm, my roommates were glued to the television. I joined them. We spend most of the afternoon there, watching in horror as the second tower collapsed, as news commentators replayed it all over and over and over. I went to Advertising 281 that afternoon, since the University had not officially cancelled any classes, and Professor Hall sent us home. Back to the television.

In the days that followed, I must have seen the events happen hundreds, if not thousands, of times. No one had new information. The University still did not officially cancel classes, saying that if we stopped our lives, they won. Even though Beckman Institute, home to one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, was locked down and under military guard. It is on the list of the country's likely targets for terrorism or nuclear attack. We discussed the events at length in my Children and the Media class, going over how a child would react to seeing something like that on television. We jumped right into the crisis management section, covered how corporations such as the Walt Disney Corporation handled things, in my Public Relations course. I missed Mental Retardation, one of the only times I skipped a class, to attend a memorial ceremony at Kranert Center for the Performing Arts.

It was a powerful day, week, month, year. A lot of things changed and a lot of things stayed the same. Perhaps innocense was lost. I had been to both New York City and Washington, D.C. within a year prior to last September. Pictures taken from the Statue of Liberty, taken in April of 2001, have my mom, dad and myself grinning against the backdrop of the New York City skyline, the Twin Towers standing tall behind us. We never thought those pictures would have any more significance than the memory of a weekend trip to NYC to see my sister's choir sing at Carnegie Hall.

And now I'm watching this memorial service and living through it again. My thoughts are with the families of the victims. I'm lucky enough not to know anyone directly affected, but today will definitely be a day filled with remembering and reflecting.