Never Forget

Ground Zero

 

9/11 - it seems like yesterday, not 23 years ago. I was trying to figure out how to remember this day in this post and I decided just to tell my own story. I posted this originally on the 20th Anniversary of  9/11 and am reposting it.

"I was on the telephone with my longtime friend who worked in the Office of the Secretary of Transportation in DC when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. We continued talking for a few minutes. She said she had to go. I could tell from her voice it was bad. Soon thereafter they began evacuating the federal agencies and the White House. Having lived in DC for decades by then, DC is what I considered my hometown. My husband and I had friends at many of the agencies, the Pentagon, and on Capitol Hill. I had also been to the World Trade Center many times for business and for pleasure. My husband and I had dined at Windows on the World on the top floor of the North Tower. My first job out of law school was at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and their New York office was housed in the World Trade Center. The CFTC seal was later found in the rubble.

 While glued to the television watching coverage, all the windows in my home began shaking violently. I knew DC had been hit. I would soon learn that it was the plane hitting the Pentagon, and the sound waves had travelled down the Potomac River to my home not far way.

It's hard to describe what is was like unless you were in NYC or DC the days following 9/11. DC was a ghost town in mourning. It felt like the morning after the apocalypse in a movie. But it was real. The airport was closed, the Metrorail was closed, agencies were closed, street closures everywhere, malls closed, major-league sports and concerts cancelled. Life was on hold. You knew instinctively that life would never be the same. Luckily, none of our friends were lost, but so many others of course were.

A couple of weeks later, things were slowly starting to reopen. I had great seats to a Neil Diamond concert at the Verizon Center (now Capitol One Arena) for my husband, my daughter, and myself purchased many months earlier. The Verizon Center had been closed since 9/11, but it was announced it would reopen starting with that concert. We discussed what to do and decided to go. 

All eyes that night were on that venue, because it was the first event in DC with a large crowd (20,000 people) since 9/11. Many thought it might be the perfect target for another terrorist attack that most thought was coming. We took the Metrorail downtown as it had reopened, past a still darkened and shuttered Reagan National Airport.

Security was very tight at the concert. You could feel the tension in the air. As the concert began, the center was darkened. Mr. Diamond entered with a sole spotlight on him singing Coming to America. But halfway into the song, he changed the lyrics "They're coming to America" to "Stand up for America." Twenty thousand people rose to their feet singing "Stand up for America" in defiance and in resilience, and there was not a dry eye in the house. 

I tried to find a video of it to share but couldn't. I can't even find the exact date. I have no words of wisdom to share. Just a snapshot of my recollections of that day and its immediate aftermath. My thoughts today are with all those innocent lives lost and those who loved them and our own collective loss of innocence on that day. May everyone who died on that day and its twenty year aftermath rest in peace."