Where were you, on this day in 2001?

Before eleven years ago, I don’t suppose I ever understood the answers to the “”Where were you?” question that would sometimes circulate at the barber shop or during a church dinner.  I had heard it before in two variations – “Where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor?” and “What were you doing the day JFK was shot?”

 

I remembered where I was the day that Challenger 25 blew up.  I was home sick from high school, and Mom came up to my room and asked me if I wanted to watch the shuttle launch on TV.  I declined, and I still remember how.  “No, mom, I’ve seen it before, and this one won’t be any different.”

 

As tragic as that was, we went right on going to school and to work and nothing changed.  It wasn’t the defining event of my generation.  Not yet.

 

The morning of 9-11, I was driving, heading to Lake Ozark to check on a rental property I had there, and had just topped the hill going into West Plains, MO.  Ironically, I was within sight of the radio station to which I was currently listening.  The DJ that day was Randall, a friend of mine I had known since high school.  He came on and announced the event.  At first I thought he was joking, as he was known to do – he announced for weeks that he was going to walk naked down main street at a certain date and time, and he did indeed – “Naked” was the name of his pet goat.

 

I just kept driving, not thinking about it much.  When the announcement of the second attack came, the music on the radio just stopped.  I don’t think a single song played for the next two hours.  I remember thinking that this might be the “Day the Music Died.”  I started humming it.

 

I stopped in a little town of Richland, MO, where I briefly lived, and pulled into the police station.  I showed them my badge, and they let me go behind the counter, where they were huddled around a little black and white TV, watching the replays of the first tower coming down.

 

I just felt like I had to continue doing what I was doing.  As an Army reservist, I knew that we would go to war over this, I just didn’t know where and with whom.  Still, I kept driving.  I inspected my property, made some phone calls to a cleaning contractor, and started home.  I stopped to top off my gas tank, even though I had slightly more than half.  I don’t really know why I did that, but it turned out to be a good call, since the price of gasoline tripled, with lines around the block everywhere.  We still had a hundred gallons in the farm tank.

 

I got home in the late afternoon, and the first thing my wife asked was, “Will you have to leave?” I told her I didn’t know.  I didn’t know much of anything.  We didn’t talk about it that night at all.  I knew where all my army stuff was if I needed to pack in a hurry, but there was nothing I could do.

 

With the exception of the few thousand brave souls at ground zero, I would imagine that the other three hundred million Americans felt much the same way.  For then, at least, there was nothing we could do.