Remembering 9/11

Events of 911
Daddy and I are watcing the replay of the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11/2001. It was something I didn't get to see live, because I was working with the Saint Petersburg (FL) cergy association that day. Daddy just remembers watching TV at home, but neither of us saw it as cose as the History Channel now shows us.

He missed Pearl Harbor because he got out of the Navy the month before thanks to Congressman Peterson. He was supposed to join the reserves for 30 days, then they said a year, but he was 28 or 29 and wrote to Peterson. He was sent orders to report to Key West, or to request discharge, so he did request discharge and pushed for it. That was about 2 weeks before Pearl Harbor. He says in a way he'd like to have stayed, but he had a wife and a business. He thinks if he had gone, he would be at the bottom of the ocean.

"That was stupid," he says, though, about going to war on Iraq, in comparison. The US was trying to make peace with the Japanese. And the day after Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war onthe US. But the World Trade Center came from no one country. "There wasn't much you could do."

"That guy that directed all of this probably looks at it and laughs," he said. "The FBI man said they were working on this and had suspicions, and then they were ordered to go onto something else or quit or something."

The scenes on TV show desert-like sands that will later prove to be poisonous debris, people in masks and makeshift coverings, mobile phones that don't work, dust clouds, the voice of the then-President.

Living in s smaller town, a lesser populated part of the country, it doesn't seem possible that there can be that many people crowded into one city. Why would they want to be there in the first place? And yet Daddy never knew I was once in those buildings, once visited a friend who worked above the first set of elevators high in one of the buildings -- I couldn't tell you which one.

Another other major disaster time in my family life was when I came home from school to tell my mother tht President John F. Kennedy had been shot. She was off work that day. We turned on the TV and watched. Again, she was afraid we would go to war. We would be vulnerable.

Still, vulnerable is so relative. As a journalist, I, too, am documenting when I'm at the scene of a disaster. When I'm a chaplain, I'm reponding to people's needs, not focusing on my own. But when the little things happen, when the world of the ones I love and who love me becomes smaller, then I feel much more vulnerable. Then I feel very, very small.