September 11th

Today is September 11th. I started this blog on September 28, 2007, so this is the first 9/11 anniversary that's occurred since I began blogging.

When I was in college, there were five guys I considered my closest friends in the world. After college, we went our separate ways and seldom saw each other, but I still thought of those five men as my only real friends. In 1998, one of the guys died unexpectedly and the five of us who remained all attended his funeral. Realizing we weren't getting any younger, we agreed to hold a reunion every year to revisit old memories and catch up on what was happening in each of our lives.

In 2001, we had decided to get together sometime in October, after the Texas weather cooled a little. It was my responsibility to arrange a location where we could meet for the day, a motel room or suite with enough space for a poker game and a refrigerator where the beverage supply would stay chilled.

I called around and made a list of three or four potential locations that would meet our requirements, and on the morning of September 11th I got in the car to check out each one personally and reserve a suite at the most promising place.

I had the car radio on, and as I drove I realized the local sports talk program had been preempted by a news bulletin, something about a major air traffic accident in New York City. An airplane had gone out of control and crashed into a World Trade Center tower. Sheee-it, I thought. My wife hated flying, and now I'd never get her on a plane if it was ever necessary to travel somewhere by air.

I drove another mile or so and the story changed. A second plane had hit the WTC, and now it seemed like a terrorist attack was taking place. There was a lot of confusion in NYC, but things didn't look good. I decided to return home to see what was happening on television. According to the radio, there was a good chance the WTC towers might collapse and that other passenger flights had been hijacked and might need to be shot down.

By now, we all know the rest of the story. People my age sometimes ask each other, "Where were you when Kennedy was shot ? What were you doing when you heard the news ?" Until the day the towers fell, the assassination of the president was the signature tragedy in post-WWII history for a lot of us.

I remember where I was the day JFK was assassinated, and I'll always remember where I was and what I was doing on the morning of 09/11/2001. Needless to say, I didn't place any suite reservations that day.

There were a lot of bad outcomes to 9/11, and every American could probably come up with his or her own personal list of the worst ones. For me, the worst outcome was that a few really bad men figured out how to exploit the situation to advance an agenda that wasn't good for the country and gain political advantage in elections.

The only good outcome was that Alan Jackson was inspired to write Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning), a song that moves me emotionally every time I hear it.