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Good evening, PsyOp...

9/11 after 6 am in California, I was up getting ready for my brother and sister who were flying in that day to take over packing up our parents’ home. We had flown them to Texas about 2 weeks earlier and moved them into residence in an assisted living complex near Dallas.

The phone rang. “You missed your flight?” I answered, figuring it was my brother. His voice was strained and he said that his flight not coming. He knew what was happening, and told me. He had noticed no planes in the sky as he drove up to DFW and as an airline employee, he was able quickly to find out that it was an AA plane that had gone into the WTC.

I broke into uncontrolled sobbing immediately, knowing that the world had shifted on its orbit, that many people were dead or dying, that we were at war, that most of the lovely programs President Bush had wanted to implement were going to be shelved, just like Lincoln had not been able to do what he had wanted, but had gone into a terrible war instead.

I turned on the TV and watched in shock, even though my husband and I had predicted this day would come way back in 1992. They didn’t know where President Bush was then and I waited hoping to hear something definitive. Finally I called my husband. He was at his mother’s because she had just had surgery. I thought carefully about what I was going to say because I knew she would be answering the phone.

I told her I was sorry to call so early, but that something had happened — that our family was fine, but I needed to speak to my husband. I had thought about saying to him “We’re at war,” but instead I said that I thought President Bush was okay, but he should turn on the TV, any channel.

Then I was back zombie-like in front of the TV.

My sister called from a payphone at her airport. She said she had been on her plane waiting to take off and then they had gone back to the terminal. Nobody knew why. As I told her, she turned after each sentence and repeated the news to the other passengers behind her in line for the pay phone. “Terrorists have hijacked planes and have been flying them into buildings. The World Trade Center has been hit. One tower is totally destroyed, one is half destroyed. The Pentagon has been hit.”

Not long after, the second tower came down, too.

I called my parents. I told my mother that her two children were okay, they had not gotten into the air. They hadn’t turned on the TV yet, but they did after my call.

Then I was alone in an almost empty house for 6 days. My flight back had been scheduled for Thursday. I went home on Monday. I was the only woman passenger on the plane, and everyone on the plane looked like they would tackled and kill the first person to make a false move.

I was sleeping. My best friend called me and told me to get the TV on immediately. I asked why, she said how the first tower had just been hit, so I had Fox on when the 2nd tower got hit. I had called her when Princess Di had been in the auto accident, to turn on her TV. She definitely made the more important call when she let me know about the attack on the Twin Towers. I was glued to the TV from that point on.

I called into work and said I wasn’t coming in that day, as I worked right near downtown Chicago, and the commentators on TV were saying that the Sears Tower in Chicago was one of the possible sites to be hit. Figured it was not the day to go to work in the city. Besides which, you couldn’t have peeled me off from viewing the TV set with a paring knife.

When I did go back to work at the University, an interesting event took place. I worked directly for the Head in a very large math department where many students were from foreign countries (math picks up a lot of foreign students as U.S. students don’t like math). Two of our dept. staff members were walking out of the building directly behind two of our Arab graduate students (one of whom was a part-time staff member himself that I had some contact with). The one student turned to the other and said (he had a camera) paraphrasing, I’m going to take a picture of the Sears Tower while it’s still there, and they both laughed. Our two staff members walking behind them reported them to me to tell the Dept. Head, and they ended up having to apologize in writing for what happened. Made for an uneasy working relationship, to say the least.