It’s still such a vivid picture for me. I was such a young pup, and yet it’s still so vivid. It was just two months after my grandfather suddenly and tragically passed. Everything still felt so raw.
I had stayed up a bit late the night before cleaning my room because I was going to lose my game privileges if I didn’t, and nothing was going to keep 10 year old Spots away from her Formula 1. Fun Spots lore: My favourite track in this game was Monza, and I loved to drive as Michael Schumacher and recreate the on-track rivalry with DC. I also did a little bit of work with 98lite, which somehow still exists today.
I don’t think school had started yet – I don’t remember if it was because we were starting the process of moving, or because the term just simply hadn’t started at all. Even chores wouldn’t have allowed me to stay up until 2:30 a.m. on a school night. But I distinctly remember that being the exact time I went to bed.
I remember hearing some shouting from the next room just about 6 hours later, and when I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, I trotted out in my PJs to see my mum on the phone with my grandmother, both of them watching a building in New York on fire. What in the world?
Then I saw it. I watched it live. I saw the South Tower of the World Trade Center being struck by a hijacked Boeing 767 live on NBC. I still remember the shock in the voice of the woman who was on the phone with Katie Couric when it happened. I found a video clip of it on YouTube, if you want to relive it with me, but I will warn you it is incredibly graphic and shows the actual act of terror that traumatised the world – including young Spots. The link will seek you to the time where I sat down on the couch; the impact is almost exactly two minutes later.
This day always makes me feel such a wide range of emotions. Profound grief and sadness at the senseless loss of life. Anger at the fact that multiple high-level government officials knew such an attack was being planned but couldn’t manage to connect the dots and prevent it from happening. And while it isn’t a justification for it, I know part of the reason why the terrorists wanted to do this in the first place was due to buildings in Lebanon being bombed in the 1980s, and I’m angry that the West let that happen, too. Senseless death is always senseless.
It’s also a profound sense of gratitude, love, and my very best wishes for the first responders that went in to those buildings and saved so many lives. We focus on the three thousand lost, as we should, but not enough focus gets to the over ten thousand saved before the towers collapsed. When I write stories about heroic Dalmatians in a fire brigade, it is in their honour and spirit. When I drive past a fire house – after I look to see if a Dalmatian is present – I think of the bravery and courage of the people that work there.
I looked back on prior writings I’ve made on this solemn anniversary. I realised in my 2019 posts, I made a few minor errors: I wasn’t in school at the time. And I thought it was CNN we were watching, but when I went looking for the archival footage this evening, it didn’t seem familiar at all. It didn’t have that voice on the phone, the one with the immediacy, the panic. It didn’t match my memory. Then I clicked the NBC video, and that was it. It was like being transported back in time. We did end up switching over to CNN by the afternoon though, as illustrated in the sole photo I have of that day, taken on my grandfather’s digital camera:
These events brought about modern conspiracy theories. I don’t know if half of the wacky things on the Internet today would be believed by anyone if that seed hadn’t been planted back in 2001. These events ushered in a wave of privacy-disrespecting laws and agencies worldwide that I don’t. know has actually made anyone any safer.
And yet, these events changed a good number of us in ways that might not have been terrible. It was where I realised that the famous admonition to “live each day as your last” held weight. It made me further interested in world history and politics, in ways I likely wouldn’t otherwise have been. It feels so horrible to try to make anything positive out of such a travesty of an event. Yet, if the 11th of September 2001 taught me anything, it might be distilled into this:
We have no control over anyone else or the events happening around us. But we have control over how we approach them, deal with them, and interact with them. We have the power to make our own world as full of love and positivity as we possibly can.
And I believe the best way to honour the souls lost that day is to live that out earnestly.