I worked second shift at the grocery store at the time, so I was still asleep that early in the morning. Mom’s phone call woke me up, and she was frantic, saying, “Oh my god, this is it, they’re invading!!” just as if there were troops marching up the main street of my town. By the time I was awake enough to think, she’d told me to turn the TV on, and I saw the second plane hit.
I sat there with the TV all day and (of all things) processed some wool and silk for spinning, because I felt that I ought to be doing something constructive. (I still have the sweater I ended up making from that fiber.) Eventually I had to go to work (3pm), where I dealt heavily with the public. Every customer I helped was in a low mood, and asked me if I had heard or seen the news. Yes, yes, I know, they’re invading. <sigh> And while I know it’s wrong and bad of me to say this, there’s only so much of this a person can take in the course of a bouncy cashier shift, so I started pretending that I hadn’t heard. “No, was something on the news? What happened?”—no one bothered to explain it after that, and I guess I can’t really blame them.
I remember watching the TV that day, though, and wondering how it would all pan out in the end. I’m really sad that we haven’t kept that sense of purpose we had right afterward, when we had the sympathy of the world, and turned it into this politicized mess.