Ten Years Ago Today #GBE2

I couldn’t tell you where I was or what I was doing one year ago. But I remember ten years ago today very clearly. I was sitting in my car, having just rolled out of bed to take Raquel to work. It was a foggy, dreary morning here in Sonoma County and I was bleary-eyed from sleep. I turned on the radio as I waited for her to come out to the car. One of the first things I heard was a description of towers falling in New York City. I didn’t exactly remember what the World Trade Center was or what it looked like at the time, so trying to visualize what this radio broadcast was portraying or what might have caused them to fall proved extremely difficult. In my confusion, I remember saying something like “something is happening in New York” when Raquel arrived in the car. But I still couldn’t wrap my mind around what I was hearing enough to stop myself from proceeding with our original task of driving from Cotati to Santa Rosa and dropping her off at school where she was about to teach a class. So off we went, the radio continuing to describe the strange events that were still unfolding.

For background, in my life I was in the midst of a particularly stressful time of change. I had just started my graduate program in Economics at UC Davis a few days before. They started us out with something called “Math Camp”, which was about as much fun as it sounds. I was on an off day from Math Camp, so on September 11th, 2001, I had very little to do other than study math or do math problems. Not surprisingly, I was unable to do either.

By the time we got up to Santa Rosa, we both had heard plenty about what had happened – planes had been hijacked and subsequently crashed and a lot of people must have died. Tens of thousands of people could have died, but there was no way to know yet. We were too shaken by then to make any other decision than to cancel Raquel’s class and come back home – circle the wagons, so to speak. So we came home to confirm for ourselves visually what we had been hearing. Somehow it didn’t seem quite real until we saw it.

So we saw what there was to see. After a couple of hours, though, there was nothing new to see, no new information to be had. So we went out to lunch. I know it seems weird to go out and eat, but we couldn’t think of anything else to do and we felt we must get away from the TV. After that, I can’t say what we did or thought or felt. I do know, however, that in the course of that day, my life also changed. What exactly caused it to change I can’t say, but I’m pretty sure that being bombarded with the loss of American lives on television in a sudden, senseless manner was a major factor in the change. And, like in previous changes for me, this one didn’t take place right away. It was something that came to me gradually over the year after 9/11.

A year later, I had to make a life changing decision, whether to work my tail off to continue in school or to quit my graduate program and re-join the workforce. By 2002, the decision clearly also revolved around the direction of my family life as well: when were children going to enter the picture and would we stay close to home or go to some distant place to chase academic success. The horrible reality that 9/11 brought home to me was that life could be cut short all too easily and without warning or fault. In an instant, it could be over. I’m not going to say that was the only reason I made the decision to quit school, but it was a significant factor.
I have thoughts about everything that came after 9/11 itself, but ultimately those are decisions made by other people that had or have little direct impact on my life. The largest impact of 9/11 was the one I chose myself. I’ll give silent thanks to those who died that day for helping me make that choice.