9/11..

CNN.com is running a blurb at the top of their page about them airing the original broadcasts from 9/11 online for free this Monday. In real time starting at 8:30am. I am unsure how I feel about this...granted it happened 5 years ago, but still I have vivid memories of the occurrences of the day. I still remember all the details of the day and days after.

Any mention of 9/11 reminds me of my father. He worked in the World Trade Center from the mid 1980's til around 1995. As you should know the World Trade Center had been bombed once before in 1994. Not nearly the same scale as 9/11 but at the time it was unheard of. He worked on the 33rd floor at that time, and at the last minute he decided to go to a meeting in another part of Manhattan instead of staying in the building. I was in middle school at the time and I remember being rushed to the front office after the bombing so my mother could contact me and then waiting for some kind of contact from my dad...wasn't the most fun of days.

So you say, why the hell is he writing all of this about his dad, I don't really care. On 9/11 four planes took off that would be involved in the bombings, one coming from Newark Airport. As it turns out my father was flying to Houston that morning for work from Newark Airport at the same time as Flight 93, the flight that ended up crashing in Pennsylvania. His flight took off at 8:51, Flight 93 took off at 8:42.

Maybe it's me making too much of things, or whatever. But I know exactly how I felt at the time, finding out my father was flying out of Newark that day after the towers had been hit and the plane had crashed in the field...and not being able to contact him to figure out if he was ok or whatever. As much as I've been desensitized to everything you can count me out of watching any rebroadcast of that day. 5 years or 50 years, I have no desire to open that back up.

P.S.: I will try to fight the urge to write about the state of America in those past 5 years since 9/11, but I won't make any guarantees.