# A Picture Perfect Day (about 9/11 1358 words)



## Deleted member 56686 (Sep 10, 2014)

These are my memories of that day thirteen years ago tomorrow. I don't need any critiques (I won't reject them either). I just wanted to convey my thoughts from that day.



                                 A PICTURE PERFECT DAY




It was an unusually pleasant September morning in Baltimore. In Maryland summers tend to linger until late in the month. It wouldn’t be out of the norm for Baltimore to remain hot and certainly be humid, but on this morning the temperatures were in the seventies. There was not a cloud in the sky. It was by all accounts a picture perfect day.


On this September morning I was sleeping in as was my norm. I had a job to go to later that day. Often I would have the TV or radio on for noise but on this morning I kept everything off for some reason. I even slept through the noise of banging on the ceiling. I was living with my mother at the time and she would normally bang on the ceiling if she needed me for something.


At about 9:30 I finally woke up and decided to go downstairs to grab a bite for breakfast. Just before I got to the bottom of the steps my mother turned to me and said I had to look at the TV.


I looked at the television and saw the surreal sight of both towers of the World Trade Center on fire. Dan Rather was doing the narration on CBS. I was still waking up and it hadn’t registered that this was more than simply another moment of “breaking news”.
For the summer of 2001 was being remembered as the summer of the shark. A young girl in Florida was sadly killed by a shark that July and by now the media had the alleged spate of shark attacks play out like Jaws and its seventy-three sequels. Never mind that it was actually a normal year for shark attacks statistically, we had to make Nebraska safe from shark attacks if you listened to the media.


We also had the whole Gary Condit affair that summer. Some may recall he was the congressman implicated in the Chandra Levy murder. He had nothing to do with it of course but he kept denying he had an affair with her in a strange attempt to save his political career. He was more worried about losing the next election than he was about going to prison it seemed.


This was what was masquerading as important news and it wasn’t anything new. We were on our seats waiting for any pop star scandal to dominate the airwaves. After all, the cold war had been over for years. Nothing could possibly happen now.


I wasn’t awake to see the the second plane crash into the south tower on live TV but now I was seeing the replay in what seemed like a continuous tape loop. I also had missed President Bush’s statement in Florida by minutes. I didn’t miss what happened next.


The screen was continuing to show the burning towers when it suddenly went into split screen mode. A new building was now on fire, this time in Washington DC. Baltimore is located forty miles from Washington so this was something that would grab our attention.


A plane had crashed into the Pentagon and it was evident that everything was about to go into panic mode. How many planes were still in the air? How many more might attack another building in New York or Washington? We still didn’t have official word the planes had been hijacked though it was obvious to just about anyone that this was an act of terrorism.


The attention focused back on the twin towers just in time for the collapse of the south tower. I always remember this moment because a few days earlier, in one of those “breaking news” moments on MSNBC, a house was shown being burned into the ground during a standoff between police and  some common criminal. This gave me a bad feeling that the same fate was awaiting the fiery towers. I knew there was no way the firemen were going to be able to put the fires out.


 At about ten o clock my fears were all but confirmed as the south tower literally fell to the ground. Both my mother and I just watched the collapse in utter amazement. My mother finally said with horror “Look at the building. The whole building’s on fire.”


The building wasn’t on fire. It had imploded amazingly enough. I knew it too as I said “Mom it’s not on fire. The building is gone.”


And it was. Once the smoke cleared only the north tower stood, still very much on fire. In a half hour the north tower too would be gone. A plane would crash in Pennsylvania about fifteen minutes after that. The rest of the day was spent watching what must have been hundreds of amateur videos of the second tower being hit; some of them fairly close up. Other footage showed the terror on the ground as people ran frantically from the monstrous debris rushing from the collapsed towers.


There was still a lot going on outside of New York too as the media began playing their game of “Where in the World is Air Force One?” President Bush was up in the air and no one seemed to know where he was going. It even got weird locally. Mayor O Malley decided to prevent people from entering Baltimore in his infinite wisdom. Baltimore was essentially shut down. My job for the afternoon was cancelled. I cancelled out on a job the next day in Harford County because I was afraid they wouldn’t let me back into the city to go home.


The panic in Baltimore shouldn't have come to a surprise. Baltimore has historically had an inferiority complex when compared to Washington. O’Malley’s shut down of the city was no doubt some crazy plea for attention. It wasn’t necessary. I remember telling my mother that this was one time we should be glad we were the illegitimate step-sister of Washington. The terrorists had no designs on Baltimore at all.


That night, we all went to bed uncertain of what
would happen the next day, and then after. Would we be at war, possibly in Afghanistan? Was something going to happen tomorrow? How many people were dead? Would they show people jumping out of the towers? A Spanish language station did show such footage that night.


For the next few days people were unusually polite to each other. The shark attacks had magically disappeared. Trent Lott was arm in arm with Barbara Mikulski singing “God Bless America.” The trivial political arguments were set aside for the time being. The only thing that seemed disgusting to this author was the sight of Gary Condit looking fairly serene at a memorial. He must have thought that the media would no longer focus on him. He was right. It was like Gary Condit in some way was thanking god for 9/11. He probably wasn’t of course but he could have looked at least a little more mournful.


The Kumbaya moments didn’t last long. Within a year and a half we were mired in a war in Iraq as well as the war in Afghanistan. We waited with baited breath as to what shocking thing would Michael Jackson do this week. Cable news networks began attacking each other with more veracity than politicians ever did. At least Nebraska remained safe from the plague of sharks.


Are there lessons to be learned from that picture perfect day? Perhaps there are. For some it was a time to be wary of those who looked different in the name of security. For a period it seemed that we were entering a new version of the “Red Scare”.


But for others it was a time to reflect and to value those that are close to us. We became more thoughtful about things. We accepted our differences in a way we hadn’t previously. We didn’t let go of our hopes and dreams. In summary, we realized we are all human beings and what we want after all is simply peace. And so in the immortal words of John Lennon I ask…




                                       ................GIVE PEACE A CHANCE


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## Fivetide (Sep 10, 2014)

Mrmustard615 I really enjoyed your account of the perfect day. I like your summing up of feelings at the end. 
The only thing that I would say is, for people like me from the mother colony, I don't know who certain people were in the story, for example it might have been a good idea to say something like : Gary Condit, former politician and member of the Democratic Party, this would help because to get a sense of who you are talking about I have to google it. 
I think one of the problems when anyone recounts a memory is that they somehow forget that the person reading it may not have been there. Sometimes you get the feeling that the author is talking to someone who shares the same memory and expects the reader to automatically fill in the blanks.
Saying that, you conveyed the feelings that a lot of people had after that day, throughout the world.
Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed it.


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## Deleted member 56686 (Sep 10, 2014)

Hi Fiveside.

First off I'm glad you enjoyed it. I really wrote this after a discussion with another forum member in another thread (unrelated strangely enough).

As for my experiences that day I was looking at it through the eyes of an American, namely myself. I imagine people not from the US would not be familiar with Condit. It wasn't so much about him as it was about the media's propensity to create scandals in a ploy to raise their ratings. They really were going bonkers over his scandal and the whole shark attack business. It is what passed for entertainment in those days I guess.

Anyway I'm glad you appreciated it. Anyone who has thoughts about that day please feel free to use this thread to convey your feelings. Just don't turn it into a political gripe session :smile2:


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## Plasticweld (Sep 10, 2014)

Thanks for sharing, I was in Conn. on the coast on that day, a bright blue sky, not a cloud in sight.   My son and I were working on a high rise building welding studs. I had a small radio that he was listening to as we worked.  I remember there were as many false reports about what was going on as there were ones that were correct.. From the top of the building we were working on you could see the smoke from the Twin Towers.  The job site had more than 60 people working on it, by late afternoon there were only three of us left there working.  Everyone else seemed distracted and out of sorts.  I had worked until almost dark before finishing my day.  I had checked into a hotel the day before, only to find out when I when there that evening that I had been kicked out of my room, they needed it for emergency workers and for police who were now making their way towards the city.  


Every time I see a bright blue sky, not a cloud in it, I am reminded of that day... Thanks for sharing...Bob


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