United 93 Friday night. It was a good movie, but we agreed that during the entire movie, right up to the final seconds, we hoped it would have a different ending. How strange is that, to think “If the plane stays in line a little longer, all flights will be grounded, and all those people will be okay…”, or hoping that they could kill the terrorists and land the plane safely, when we knew perfectly well how it would end? I can’t believe it’s been five years. I remember exactly where I was sitting (right here), what I was wearing (my exercise outfit), what I was doing (putting off exercising) when the phone rang and Fred told me to turn on the TV. I remember seeing the second plane hit and saying to Fred “Are we at war? I think we’re at war.” because one plane was an accident, but two couldn’t possibly be. I remember sitting in front of the TV all day, interspersed with running out to take as much cash out of the bank as I could, going to the grocery store to buy water and dried beans, looking at the faces of the people around me, thinking “How can they look so normal?” All last week as I linked to entries from previous years at the bottoms of my entries, I’d see my entries from 2001, and I’d think “We didn’t know. We didn’t know what was coming, we had no idea.”, and feeling sorry for we pre-9/11 Americans who could never have believed what would be happening in a matter of days. Five years. It seems like we’ve lived with the spector of those towers falling for as long as I can remember. It seems like yesterday when I sat in this chair and watched the towers fell and said to Fred, “How many people are in those buildings?” Having no concept that so many people could have fit in those towers, because I’d never seen them up close. I had no idea they were so big. I had no frame of reference.
"These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve."