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9:09:00 AM EST
Hearing Nothing at the moment
Memories
Heh. Okay, so maybe I wasn't clear enough in that last entry, when I said of the Kennedy assasination, "there's another, far more recent event that has supplanted the Kennedy Assassination has the moment everyone remembers where they were." I say that because people sent me e-mail going, "Oh, you're talking about when John Lennon was shot," or "...when Challenger exploded" and not "...on 9/11," which is what I was thinking about.
Although now that these other folks mention them, I have a clear memory of what I was doing for those two previous events as well as 9/11. Allow me to briefly share all three with you.
John Lennon's Shooting: I was at Disneyland when it happened, interestingly enough, and my sister told me about it when I got home. I was 11 at the time and not a huge Beatle fan, although obviously I knew who he was. But my friend Clete was the biggest 11-year-old Beatle fan you'd ever want to meet, and I knew he'd be crushed. So my first thought about the matter wasn't about John Lennon, but whether my friend Clete was going to be okay.
The Challenger explosion: I was in high school for that one and was coming out of the school office with the flag to raise up the school flagpole (no one else was doing it on a daily basis, so I took it on myself to do it) when a guy named Paul Lai walked by and told me that the shuttle had blown up. I didn't believe him, but I eventually realized he was serious. So I took the flag, ran it up to the top of the flagpole, and then lowered it to half-mast.
9/11: This is ironic, in a sad way. I realized something was wrong in the real world because all of a sudden the Internet stopped working; I literally couldn't access any site other than my own. Finally I got one picture on the CNN front page, and it was of one of the towers on fire. I turned on the TV, got on the phone and don't much remember using the Internet for the rest of the day after that.
Wanna share where you were for any of these?
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I, like you, found John Lennon's demise cause for concern for a friend's welfare who held him in exalted esteem. I broke the news to her as gently as possible. Illness put me in front of the tube for the other two - flu had me on the sofa when Challenger exploded; my wife's scream woke me from the sleeping pill-induced haze while recovering from a cardiac function test... she had just seen a second plane strike the WTC and could no longer handle the grief she was feeling by herself.
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9/11: I work for a newspaper, we don't have a TV, and keep the radio off most of the time. So about 10 o'clock, I'm at the table working on my second cup of coffee, I get a phone call from the newspaper. Airplanes have hit the WTC. The towers set on fire. One of them came down, not sure about the other. Another plane hit the Pentagon. The building's on fire. Tens of thousands may be dead. Can you come in?
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9/11. At the time I was living and working in Brooklyn. I was very busy that morning but since I was the only one with a computer my co-workers kept coming over to see if I could get on the internet & find out what was going on, they were hearing all sorts of weird things on the radio about one of the towers being on fire. I remember within a few hours the towers had fell and we could see the plume of smoke looking down 7th Ave in Brooklyn.
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9/11: Leaving Windor Castle for London. I kept seeing groups murmuring together in the street, but I finally caught the words Twin Towers on the train. I lived on Long Island during the first WTC bombing, so I joined the talking couple. "Hi. I keep hearing people whispering. What's going on?" The woman answered, "The Twin Towers are gone," and I said "Gone? Really?" I didn't believe her; she wasnt lying intentionally, but her facts were wrong. After all, skyscrapers don't just fall down...
11/25/03 1:33 PM
The gym, usually bustling with activity, grew motionless. The perpetual clanking of machines stopped. Hands were drawn to faces instead of dumbbells. Suddenly that extra ten pounds everyone was trying to shed seemed meaningless and inconsequential in the scheme of things.