9/11/01 in Everyday life

This day always resonates with me in a weird way.

At the time I was working overnights and not in the news business, and I got home around 6-7 a.m. I forget exactly when. I had to drop my car off at the mechanic about a mile from my house to get a couple things done with it. Then I walked home, or maybe I waited for the bus. Who knows now.

And then I slept. All morning.

I got a call from my mechanic around noon to let me know the car was ready, then went right back to sleep. This was in the days before I had a cell phone, so no one was texting me (and of course, texting wasn't super huge then). I finally woke up about 2 p.m., logged on (oh, dial-up) to check my email and immediately got an IM telling me to turn on the TV.

To me, since I didn't see it and live in the immediacy of it, it's always been kind of a bad dream. I didn't see people falling out of windows to their deaths, I didn't see the towers falling down, I didn't see the planes plowing into the towers. I don't write this to minimize what happened that day; to the contrary. But my perspective will always be skewed.

(Now when some knuckleheads let off bombs in my city a few months back, killing a handful and maiming hundreds, that was real.)

At the time, I lived in a wee town a couple hours from New York, the Pentagon and Shanksville. I was removed from all of it, but it was so close, too.

There's my incoherent rambling. Don't know where I'm really going with this entry, other than to say ... damn, it's been a long time -- yet it feels like it was a year or two ago.