This particular day, although it is of national and to some extent international significance, has become a touchstone for me about Hannah's memory. It doesn't diminish what I feel for everyone who lost loved ones or friends or mentors or neighbors that day, or the terror we all experienced.
For me it was a time right before Hannah was going to start a new stage of her life -- her first day of preschool was September 13th. She was three years old. She was becoming a big kid and not just my baby any more. We were enjoying our usual morning time together, watching some children's TV and eating breakfast, and in the back of my mind, I was relishing it a little bit more knowing that we wouldn't have that as an everyday occurrence once she began her schooling. (Full disclosure: I was also looking forward to having a couple of hours a week of "me time" once preschool started, as well.)
We had one of the area PBS stations on, and I believe we were watching Sesame Street. I was sitting in the big armchair across from the TV and she was sort of flopping around, going from my lap to the couch to playing on the floor and back as she was watching. I probably had a book or magazine handy and was glancing into it in between viewing and commenting with Hannah.
All of a sudden, Elmo disappeared from the TV screen and what looked like a burning skyscraper took his place. It didn't register immediately which particular building it was, and there was no commentary. I thought at first that either one of us had sat on the remote and accidentally switched channels (to some Schwarzenegger action film?) or that the cable was glitching. I found the remote and started switching and noticed more channels were showing this. By then the news feeds had started to get coordinated and the commentary was being played, and it started to register that (what was thought to be) a small plane had hit one of the WTC towers.
All of this probably occurred in less time than it's taken me to type this out just now, so Hannah, being sort of active, didn't even appear to notice that something was off, apart from asking me to change the channel and then wandering into the next room to find a toy she was looking for.
I sat there and was just starting to grasp that a bad accident had happened, and listening to the Today show folks discussing it, when the second plane zoomed into the frame and hit the second tower. After being paralyzed for a few minutes, I began scrolling through channels again and realized, along with everybody else watching, that this was a deliberate attack of some kind. Hannah was coming back into the room, so I kept scrolling until I came to the Canadian public TV station which was the only thing still airing kids' shows, and turned that on for her. I went into the kitchen after that and turned on NPR, so I could listen to what was going on without her seeing anything frightening.
At that time Jon worked for Pall in Ann Arbor, and they were having their annual meeting/sales conference. Normally this meeting would have taken place at a resort or other offsite location, but due to budgetary constraints, they were actually having it at the Marriott down the road a ways from where we lived, so instead of being several states away for this meeting he was literally in the neighborhood.
Another division of the company was located in the greater NYC area on Long Island somewhere, so a fair number of the attendees at this meeting were, in fact, from NYC itself.
At any rate, while Hannah played and watched TV and I lurked by the radio, I called and checked in with my dad (in TX), my mom (over in East Lansing), and Jon's sister, who with her husband lived in Brooklyn. I knew that her husband daily took the train into Manhattan which was routed directly under the WTC and I was afraid he might have been in danger. As it turned out, he had left considerably earlier and was comparatively safe at his office near Greenwich Village, though he did end up having to walk most of the way home to Brooklyn later that afternoon.
Jon came home at noon. He said they had cancelled the days meetings and were mostly providing space and time for the out-of-state employees to contact their families and figure out travel arrangements, and there wasn't anything for him to do. One of the women who was at the meeting had a terrible scare; her husband worked in one of the towers and she had seen the planes hit. It turned out, fortunately, that he had stayed home from work that day to deal with someone doing maintenance in their apartment, so he was spared.
It was a beatiful clear, sunny, faintly cool day just like this one (and like every September 11th since then). We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging around at home, playing with Hannah, spending time outside and talking to neighbors. I made a big pot of spaghetti sauce. We kept the TV mostly off and just sort of tag-teamed listening to the NPR coverage, or occasionally sneaking a glance at CNN if the other of us had Hannah far enough away so she wouldn't see anything. That night, after she went to bed, we were glued to the television for quite a while.
At the time we lived under the glide paths for both Detroit Metro airport and Willow Run, and although we had become so used to the planes we didn't even notice them, the silence was jarring for that week or so afterwards.
Jon's father had been traveling to some conference or other, and was delayed returning home. He finally got on a circuitous route home, one leg of which brought him into Detroit Metro for a few hours on the following Sunday, so we met up with him for dinner near the airport.
Emily was conceived the Saturday following 9/11. Not intentionally, although we had been discussing whether/when to have a second child; though now it seems almost fated.
I'm always struck by the fact that 9/11 turned into a day of closeness for our family, and that it was the last time that it was just the three of us. Most of that week was taken up by spending time together, watching as much news as we could get away with (without exposing Hannah) and trying to resume some normalcy -- marking the start of her preschool days, focusing on keeping everything around her upbeat and safe.
It seemed so strange today to send my kids off to school -- and it's another time of firsts for us, as Max is starting kindergarten and marking the end of being "the baby". It feels weird to have today be in some ways very much business as usual, and yet so infused with memories and emotions of a time when he and Emily weren't even a thought.
