A lot of us are going to be remembering today the terrible events of 9/11 ten years ago, and what they were doing that day… this is a rambling recollection of my pretty ordinary life on that day.
We were living in Pennsylvania, USA at the time. We had been there for about three months… Craig was doing a teaching exchange at a teaching hospital and our young children were booked into the local school..
To explain, Perth is a great place to live, but nothing ever happens in Perth. This is a very quiet and laid-back little city. A lot of young people from Perth are dying to leave, just because it is so quiet (and nearly always move back home as they get older for the very same reason…) Craig and I were still in the young category who wanted to be somewhere exciting. And we were in America! of all places. Fed on a childhood diet of US sitcoms and TV series and Hollywood movies all our lives, we had been brought up brainwashed into believing America was the place everything happened. It seemed everywhere we turned there was something famous, somewhere where something amazing or fabulous or eventful and interesting had happened. We’d only seen it in the movies but now we were visiting those places, seeing it, experiencing it, living in it! It seemed so awesome and exciting and overwhelming and we were there.
We had met lovely people and made friends. I was homesick but I liked the little town we were living in, and I loved the friendly happy people. They were so welcoming and kindhearted. We even entertained thoughts about a more permanent move… too early to make any decisions but we were talking about it.
So.
The children had just got off to school, Craig was already at work and I was doing a bit of housework before my usual jog/brisk walk. The phone rang as I was about to head out. It was my brother, checking to see we were home and OK. He had seen it on the evening news in Perth… this was about 9.30am Pennsylvania time… I turned on the TV just in time to see footage of the second plane. I didn’t go out for anything at all that day just stayed glued to the TV; my family all rang at some point to check we were OK, they had also heard about a plane missing over Pennsylvania which ?I think? I’m not sure now, was information that was kept from us actually living there…
My children came home from school, and I immediately switched the TV off, thinking naively that they wouldn’t know about it, and I wanted to protect their young sweet minds …. naturally their teachers had had the TV on in the classroom all day also. My eldest son, 11 years old, asked if the people jumping out of windows were going to be OK. I just said, no, darling. I felt a tiny twinge of anger at the complete lack of censorship, but was too confused and blank with the horrors of the day to think about saying anything to their teachers. Anyhow, any small petty feelings I might have had about my children’s innocence seemed completely and utterly trivial by comparison.
The day was surreal… we were in a country in which events such as these were a common silver-screen occurrence. Stuff like this does actually happen in the US, according to the movies. We had seen all this sort of thing in the movies before, we had seen planes crashing in movies before we had seen people running terrified down the streets of New York in the movies before, we had seen horrendous dust clouds in the movies before. It was kind of hard to grasp reality. I vacillated between feeling bizarrely like it was all a movie or something else dreamt up by the land of smoke and mirrors, and then back again to reality. When the reality did set in I just wanted my children to be back in that country where nothing ever happened.
The next few days, or weeks? it is hazy now, but I do remember all planes were grounded. There was an anticipatory fear about what would come next. No one knew. My mother wanted us all to come home immediately. I wondered if this was the start of a war; the president certainly said they were at war, and here we were, there. When the crashed plane was discovered in Pennsylvania, that was a fresh horror. I’ve never been so geographically close to a major plane crash like that in my life. That event was tragic enough on its own but sadly and awfully overshadowed in the media by the massiveness of the other attacks.
(Oh, and we didn’t leave, not until our time was up. I’m really glad we didn’t. Also in case you are wondering, Tim does remember the day well, Cassie only vaguely, and Sam has no memory. Tim remembers a girl crying and being taken out of class because her father worked in one of the Twin Towers. I heard he got out OK.)
Details: (seems hugely silly to mention it now, but for the sake of self-stitched September…)
Top; Butterick 4985 with different sleeves and modified to be a hoodie, white lace, details here
Skirt; skirt “d” from Unique Clothes Any Way You Like by Natsuno Hiraiwa, silver grey crepe, details here, and go here to see this skirt styled in 6 different ways
Sandshoes: Country Road
