Tuesday, September 11th
In case anyone needs to be reminded: this is the first anniversary of September 11th on the same weekday. It made me think of that morning back in 2001, in California: my daily wake-up signal used be the 7:01 flight out of John Wayne airport. That day, no plane. On the driveway, I met my neighbour Brenda, mother of three small kids, and said good morning with a smile – but her long face told me that she was having a really bad day. This is my most vivid memory of that day.
Now for my American readers, we did not have a TV, and I would not have watched the morning news anyway. Brenda must have wondered why I was still smiling – she probably didn’t imagine I was unaware then. I still think sometimes I should have gone and explained – but this is unfortunately not something I would do without encouragement.
Things kept getting eerier as I arrived at the office at 8:30 and there were still hardly any cars on the parking lot. Once in the office, of course I learnt what had happened; and one of the secretaries said “this means we’re probably at war”. I couldn’t help but ask “but with whom?” “Oh, that they will find out.”
And then everybody sat in the quiet office and tried somehow to do their work – I was preparing for a conference trip to the Fringe 2001 in Bremen, which suddenly felt very frivolous and as out of context as everything else. I remember thinking “I wonder if they’ll let me out – or back in” – but eventually of course, there were no flights to get to Germany anyway. To this day I have never watched the video footage of the fateful flights, because I realised I would probably not be able to think clearly anymore if I did.
In the evening my housemate wasn’t home, but there was a message on the phone from his mother in Wisconsin, urging him to get out of town quickly. I wrote to my parents and told him all was reasonably well where I was. A few days later, the 7-11 store got protection from the county sheriffs because the clerks were Sikhs and wore turbans.
It feels so far away now – but what was as clear to me then as to everybody else, was that the world had changed, and probably not for the better. In retrospect, this looks like the real beginning of the Bush era – and how we have got used to the “Clash of Civilisations” in the meantime! It is still amazing to me that the US has started two wars after 9/11, and we do hear of foiled terror plots sometimes – but from the UK, Australia, and Germany, not from the US.
But I had wanted to describe that morning – it felt very different on this sunny spring morning in Sydney; and the world is different now, but we have all adapted. Time heals all wounds? I don’t know; perhaps you just can’t see them anymore under all the new debris.