Where were you?

My experience on 9/11 was a bit different than most folks I know. We had been living in the Netherlands for three weeks. After two weeks in a hotel, we had moved into a condo being sublet to us. It was fully furnished. The owner was working in Romania until the end of the year which was perfect at the time because we were only supposed to be there four months. (We stayed 2.5 years and had to find another place at the beginning of 2002.)

The condo was a bit different. It was in a renovated church. Our place was in the back part of the church...what would have been the rounded apse behind the altar, and we were on the top floor. So I spent my days in a large living/dining area that was semi-circular in shape with pointed windows that looked out over a canal, some treetops, and off over to the main part of the city. The TV was a rather small one by current standards. Maybe 24 inches. It only got one BBC channel, I think, and didn't get BBC World News at all. The only English-language news network we got was CNN International and most of our channels were the Dutch ones.
Dutch networks don't dub English language programming like most other European countries do. I suppose it isn't very economical since the only folks who really speak Dutch are the Dutch (and northern Belgians, but they call it Flemish) and a few other small countries that were Dutch colonies. Most Dutch are fairly fluent in English, and they sub-title the foreign-language programming there. So in the afternoons I would look forward to my limited English-language programs, which mostly consisted of Diagnosis Murder and Murder She Wrote. Not programs I would be anxious to watch if I weren't starved for English. When we got our next apartment, the TV options improved quite a bit since we had several BBC channels.

I had recently discovered that the big book store in town had an English-language section and I had stocked up. The furniture in this condo was less than comfy in many ways, but I was curled up in a chair with a Margaret Atwood novel and a big pot of Russian tea I had purchased in England the month before when the phone in the condo rang.

Now, C and I didn't have cell phones at this time. Well, he had one for work. I didn't. It wasn't until we moved to our next apartment where we didn't have local phone service at all that I got a cell. The phone in the condo was a little black old-fashioned style phone with a cord. It sat on the desk and it very rarely rang. C and I just didn't talk during the day. It was about 4:30 in the afternoon and I wasn't expecting to hear from anyone.

So I got up and answered and C asked me if I was watching TV. I told him no and he told me to turn it on, that the guys he worked with had told him that planes had hit the World Trade Center in New York and there had been a bomb at the Pentagon. I stood there and argued with him that a bomb at the Pentagon wasn't possible. It just wasn't. "You can't get a bomb into the Pentagon!" I was having a really difficult time registering what he was saying. Finally he told me to just turn on the TV already so I put the phone down and went and put it on.

The coverage was on the Dutch networks as well, but obviously I went to CNN. I stretched the phone as far as I could and sat on the edge of the chair trying to figure out what I was looking at and hearing. The second tower had recently fallen and all I was seeing was a whole lot of dust in what was apparently New York. Then they started replaying the collapses, the second plane hitting. The people hanging out of and jumping from the windows of the top floors. After I picked my jaw up off the ground I spent a few minutes of trying to describe what I was seeing to C. Then I just cranked up the volume and held the phone out so he could hear it while I sat in stunned silence.

After several minutes, he needed to go back to work and I hung up the phone and just sat and watched the coverage by myself, trying to let it sink in. There wasn't anyone to talk to. I didn't have any friends over there. I felt a rather overwhelming urge to fly back to the States. It's weird when something like that happens and you are half a world away. I could see that something significant was happening in my homeland and I was so incredibly sad and it bothered me that I wasn't home. After a while I dug out a calling card and called my mom and dad. I have 38 cousins on my dad's side (37 still living) and most of them live up north. I wanted to see if we knew that everyone was okay. Mom told me that she thought one of them worked at the Pentagon, but she hadn't heard anything yet about him. We talked for a little while and then hung up and after a while C came home and we watched the coverage together.

I watched it all the next two days, having nothing else to do and nothing else on my mind, and then something just clicked. The reality of it sunk in and from that point forward I could no longer watch the replays of the second plane hitting the WTC. To this day I avert my eyes and won't watch that part. It's as if I had to watch it 300 times in order for it to sink in, but once it did, I couldn't accept it. The whole thing still just makes me incredibly sad. C and I watched replays of the coverage this weekend and he talked about how angry it made him. I can't say that it has ever made me angry...just overwhelmingly sad for all the lives lost.

That night, C warned me to be careful walking around by myself. Now, we were in a very safe area of a very safe town, and I was no stranger to being on my own in a foreign country, but there was some nervousness on our part. I was already starting to dress more "European" and after this happened I made a point of not looking American or touristy in my dress. Of course, once I opened my mouth they knew I was either British or American (they often can't distinguish our accents apart), but just walking around, doing my shopping, etc. I blended in. Folks in America were apparently plastering themselves with flags and I was doing the opposite.

We had been scheduled to meet some friends in Florence, Italy three weeks after 9/11. They cancelled. We went ahead and went, not feeling as scared about flying since we would be going to and from the Netherlands. We were a little anxious that the invasion of Afghanistan we all knew was coming would start while we were in Italy, but the Europeans were being very supportive of the US and we saw some placards displayed in Italian that expressed solidarity with the US. I have a photo somewhere of one, but it isn't digital. When we first went overseas, we had intended to go down to Egypt and see the pyramids while we were there and probably go to Turkey as well. After 9/11 we decided that wasn't a good idea and stayed away.

When we came Stateside in November for a visit, we were rather taken aback by all the flags on people's homes and cars. It was...disconcerting. And apparently it had calmed down a bit by then. I guess since my perspective on the whole thing and experiences surrounding it had been a bit different, I was a little uncomfortable with the rah-rah patriotism I was witnessing. The "us against them" mentality disturbed me and still disturbs me because it became a badge of honor in some pockets of America and hasn't really gone away. Living overseas probably influenced my view of the Iraq war as well, but that's a different post altogether.

I was watching a show last night where some parents were recounting the conversation the dad was having with their son as his plane hit the WTC. Being a mother now makes me even sadder about the whole thing...I can't think about losing N and my brain sort of shuts down at the thought of it. People die every minute of every day but the horror of what happened ten years ago hits home in way that isn't really definable or even logical for those of us who weren't anywhere close to what happened. Our country has changed and not for the better, I don't think. We've learned some things as a nation, but I am not entirely sure they are the things we should have learned. I think it did wake many of us up to the reality of what goes on beyond our borders and how important that stuff is, but we haven't gotten significantly better about caring about it, I don't think.