Table of Contents
Get our free local reporting delivered straight to your inbox. No noise, no spam — just clear, independent coverage of Marblehead. Sign up for our once-a-week newsletter.
The phone rang a few minutes before 9 a.m.
"Is your television on?"
"Charles?" It was the friend we were expecting for a coffee meeting at 9 a.m. I'd just finished putting out fruit and pastries, and coffee was brewing.
"No, we never watch TV during the day. What's up?"
"Just turn it on."
Everyone reading this who was alive on Sept. 11, 2001, knows what we saw: a skyscraper with a giant hole in its side, black smoke spewing out across the clear, bright Manhattan sky.
"Wow," we and thousands of others said to each other. "That plane must have gone way off course ... "
Then, the unthinkable: Another full-sized airliner crashed into the side of the first skyscraper's twin tower. Gigantic flames erupted from story after story of the massive building. And half an hour later, the unimaginable: Both buildings collapsed, killing everyone still trapped inside, coating people running blocks away in thick, greasy, toxic dust.
Those of us living in the Boston area discovered we were an unwitting and unwilling part of the images filling our television screens. The two airliners purposely flown into the World Trade Center took off from Boston's Logan International Airport, with local people among the passengers and crew.
Everything stopped and held its breath as we absorbed more horror and learned more details. The television never went off, because there was so much to learn. There weren't just two planes, there were four. The pilots were Muslims, and the crashes were planned and financed by a fierce-looking bearded Arab, Osama bin Laden.
Twenty-five years on, we're pausing to remember that morning and all that followed. The thousands dead, the heroes and the villains. Many words have been written about 9/11, as that day came to be called. Though I've written many thousands of words since then, I've never written about our small piece of that day, our difficult experiences during a time when "difficult" didn't come close to describing what we all lived through as our sheltered world shattered and everything changed.
Our first thoughts were of our children.
As soon as the second plane hit and it was clear we'd been attacked, we called our son, who had moved to Manhattan on Sept. 8 to look for a job. He was living with his cousin in lower Manhattan, far too close to the World Trade Center.
Once we were sure he was safe, my husband, who had quickly driven to his job at WBZ, put our son to work: He climbed to the roof of his building to report live about what he saw, as people streamed by him, still running. (Some months later he started work for a company forced to relocate after its downtown offices were damaged that day.)
We exhaled, shakily, when the immediate danger seemed past. The eerie silence in the skies filled with airplane engine exhaust a few days later.
Planes were flying again. The last place I wanted to be was Logan Airport, or anywhere near a plane. But I had made a commitment to our daughter. On the first day I could get an outbound flight, I had to get to Texas to help her, her two toddlers and three dogs move to Connecticut to join her husband.
Logan Airport was eerie. Everyone was jumpy and nervous. There was a palpable sense of fear and guilt in the atmosphere. In Austin, Texas, where there had been little to no impact from 9/11, the airport and the staff seemed worse than at home — no one had any patience for the special needs of a mom and grandmother with two whiny girls and three barking dogs. When none of the pieces of our complicated morning fit together, the staff declined to help us make our flight. Then they declined to reschedule us when our original plane took off for Hartford, Connecticut, leaving our noisy crowd behind.
I'm not entirely sure how, though I'm sure it involved significant use of credit cards. But somehow, we found different paths to the same spot, and we adjusted.
And the world adjusted, as it does.
Nothing about travel is easy anymore. Because of 9/11, no one can buy a last-minute plane ticket paying cash. Because of 9/11, we have the Transportation Security Administration (and now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), X-ray scanners for your carry-ons, rules about removing your shoes and jackets and belts, limits of 3 ounces for liquids, everything sharp forbidden (though tweezers seem to get by now), special X-ray machines if you have metal parts in your body.
At first it seemed annoying, but as my daughter quipped, "I'd rather be inconvenienced than dead." Now, it's just routine.
That's the lesson, I suppose. We face the unthinkable and the unimaginable, we grieve immense losses while joy feels blasphemous. The only way out is through, and somehow, still broken, we find a path that allows us to move on.
But this, we will never forget.
Jo Ann Augeri Silva, former Marblehead Reporter editor, is a retired journalist, educator and public relations and development professional.
