A quiet city three thousand miles away, and a day that belongs to the people who did not come home.
Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary, and if I had my own choice, I would spend it in reflection. I don't have that time this week. We came back from Alaska on Monday, travelling all day, and returned to a backlog on top of the work that was already waiting. My wife and I both caught a cold on the way home. So the day is going to happen around the edges of everything else, which is probably true for most people.
There is a Twitter account that has spent the last five years broadcasting the news of twenty-five years ago as it happened. This year it has been building toward this date, and this morning it was happening in real time. At 8:46am. The first plane. The confusion, and everybody reaching for the explanation that it must have been an accident. Then the second plane, and no doubt we were under attack.
I read a lot of it before I sat down to work.
Los Angeles, 6am
I lived in downtown Los Angeles then and sold long distance phone service, which is a job that barely makes sense now. Long distance is free. Back then it cost real money, and businesses signed up for plans to cover it.
I reported to work at 6am Pacific. I would wake up while it was still dark, get on the subway, and ride out to my office at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. That corner has a strange piece of history attached to it. It was one of the places the Soviets had missiles pointed, as a cultural target. It is not a glamorous intersection. But that was the thinking.
By the time I got to work that morning it was becoming clear what was happening. Not fully. A little.
They told us work was cancelled. Go home.
The thing I still cannot get past
Here is the part that has stayed with me for twenty-five years, and it is not about me at all.
At my office in Los Angeles, three thousand miles from any of it, somebody made the call to send everyone home.
In the tower that had not been hit, people were evacuating, and the loudspeakers told them to return to their desks. Everything is fine. Go back to work. There was a plane crash close enough that you could almost reach out and touch it through the window, and people were being told to go back to their desks.
And people did. Some came all the way down and then went back up.
The battalion chief on the ground had already ordered both buildings evacuated. That order and that announcement existed at the same time, and the announcement is the one that reached people. When the second plane came through, it cut through a sky lobby where people had gathered.
I think about that more than I think about anything else from that day.
What it changed, in a small way
I don't want to make this more personal than it was. I wasn't in New York. My life did not change the way it changed for the people who went off to war, or for the families whose parents did not come home.
But that job basically ended after that. I never really went back to work there. It was part of what eventually moved me to Florida. It led to me reconciling with my parents.
We didn't have cable, and the reception in the apartment was no good, so we went down to a bar in Koreatown and watched it on the big screens and drank too much soju. What I remember most is the quiet. Downtown Los Angeles was a ghost town. Everyone had gone home. They had grounded every flight in the country, so there was nothing overhead either. The first time I heard a plane again days later, it was startling.
There was real fear underneath it. They hit New York, so they are going to hit Los Angeles next. It took a long time for that to go away.
My upstairs neighbour joined the Marines. She was maybe a hundred pounds, tall and very thin, and not who you would picture going off to fight. I was impressed by her and frightened for her at the same time.
My grandmother and Pearl Harbor
My grandmother was born and raised in Hawaii and lived through Pearl Harbor. Her first husband was a submariner (like my dad), and he was sunk by the Japanese. She went from being a sixteen year old to married to pregnant to a widow in a very short window of time. My cousin's father was that submariner's child. She later married my grandfather, and they had my mom.
I never talked to her about any of it. I was a kid, and I never knew enough to ask. I regret that now.
Every year there is Pearl Harbor Day and a string of other milestones from that war, and for most of my life none of it was personal to me. It is becoming more personal as I get older and think about my own family sitting inside that history.
September 11 is different, because I lived through it. Almost everyone alive that day did, to some degree. That is the difference between a date you observe and a date you remember.
My wife and I talk about where we were and what we felt. Most years we watch the coverage. She listens to the reading of the names. I usually don't. It lands differently for her than it does for me, and I think that is allowed.
They were two French brothers embedded in a New York firehouse, making a film about firefighters. On the morning of the eleventh they were out on a gas leak call. You hear a plane overhead, the camera comes up, and they catch the first plane hitting the building. It is one of the very few recordings of that moment that exists.
Then they go with the crew and respond to the towers, and you end up watching it from inside the lobby of the north tower rather than from across the river.
The thing that stays with me is that despite being that close, most of the firefighters in that film came home. That is not luck. That is leadership deciding to pull people out when it turned.
Ground zero
I got to the site about two years later. I had been evacuated from Florida for a hurricane and went up to New York to keep working out of the office there, and one day I walked over.
I took pictures with a disposable camera. I had to take two photographs and hold them together to get the whole scene in, because it was that big. I kept that taped up in my cubicle for years. It is still somewhere in the house.
The scale of it does not come through on a screen. You have to stand in it.
A note on the other thing
There is a version of this conspiracy conversation that goes to demolition crews and jet fuel and steel beams. I don't have patience for it.
Yes, jet fuel will not liquefy steel. It doesn't have to. The impact stripped the fireproofing off, and heat does not need to melt steel to take its strength away.
The idea that someone rigged an occupied office building for demolition without a single person noticing does not survive five minutes of thinking about it.
And it frustrates me, because there is plenty that is real to be upset about. The evacuation order that did not reach people. The air traffic controllers trying to get their supervisors to take them seriously. The confusion between agencies while the planes were still in the air. Government is people, and people make mistakes under pressure. That is worth being angry about. It is worth learning from. You do not need to invent anything.
Who this day is actually about
My own version of that morning is a small one. Fear, uncertainty, a quiet city, the sense that the curtain had been pulled back.
Other people's fathers did not come home. Other people's mothers did not come home. People got on an airplane expecting an ordinary day and were never seen again.
