I Went to Massachusetts (Last Part) and Thoughts on 9/11

Some of the last pictures I took in Boston were of the September 11th Memorial in the Common, the day before the ten year anniversary, which was the day we were to fly home.





I have a friend whose child just started kindergarten, and the school was planning a remembrance assembly. My mind was blown by the idea of trying to explain 9/11 to someone who was not even alive when it happened - where do you start?

I was in St. Maarten on that day. I was working in Simpson Bay when a co-worker (who was chatting online with a friend in NY) told me a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I thought it was a little plane, whose pilot had messed up. The scale of it, even when I saw a photo, didn't register until we turned on the radio and heard the size of the plane. We were listening to the radio when the second plane hit, and it was only then that we realized it was a terrorist attack. Both of the people I was working with were from New York, and the office was flooded with calls in and out.

We heard about the Pentagon being hit, and it felt as if all of the US was under attack. I wondered where the next attack would be.

Soon after that, the power went out on the Dutch side - it added to the doomsday feeling, and we had no way to find out what was happening. We got into our cars in order to keep listening to the radio. We heard the radio broadcasters wonder if one of the towers was leaning a little bit, and then scoffing at the idea that the buildings would go down. We ended up at the Atlantis Casino, which had generators and a bank of TVs, and we stood with a big group of other people who'd had the same idea and watched the towers fall.

What I remember the most about that morning was the feeling of continual and renewed shock. The realization that this terrible thing that happened was not over, here is a worse thing to add to it, and here is another on top of that.

Ten years later, I flew back to SXM on a flight out of Boston, and I was having second and third thoughts on the way to the airport. The news was full of the possible threat that the government had decided to talk about. Security at the airport was very tight, I think every person going through was put through the xray machine. My flight from Boston to Charlotte was underpopulated.




In the end it was a beautiful flight.