Imagine

9 years ago today I woke up and decided it was as fine a day as any to play hooky from work. It was a lousy job anyway, filled with (mostly) lousy people and long hours in the bargain. I just couldn't face it that morning and so I reset my alarm for 9 AM and went back to bed. The alarm was set to radio and when it went off I listened through sleep-haze to a couple of very jocular sounding DJs talking about a plane flying into the World Trade Center in New York.

I thought they were telling a joke.

Without waiting for the punchline, I hit snooze and went back to sleep. It had been 14 minutes since Flight 11 hit the North Tower. In another 3 minutes a live camera feed would broadcast Flight 175 hitting the South Tower, and for the first time the words terrorist attack would begin to enter the consciousness of a stunned nation.

When I woke up 9 minutes later the jocular DJs were long gone, replaced instead by serious newspeople. Reality gave way to the surreal. Like everyone else that morning near a television set, I tuned in and sat mesmerized while the largest attack on American soil continued to unfold.

It was inconceivable. It was too much.

That afternoon I had lunch with a friend in the north part of Toronto where the shops and restaurants were still open. I remember we looked at shoes.

Shoes. 

It's embarrassing to admit now how little I understood that day about the impact the events of September 11th would have on our lives, but then I wasn't a mother yet. All I wanted was regular life back. I didn't know there would never again be a time like the before-time. Our collective innocence was snatched away that morning, forever erased in 102 minutes that changed the world.

Years later I would take a trip to NY with the same friend I had lunch with that day. We visited Ground Zero and although I brought my camera along I didn't take many pictures. It felt disrespectful. If you've ever been there, then you will know what I mean. It's a solemn place, cast in shadows by the skyscrapers that still surround it; a hushed presence hidden among the loudness and chaos that is still New York. It is full of ghosts.

A few days later, on a happier mission to find tiny toys in a different part of the city, I was again reminded of the events of September 11th when I stumbled across what seemed like an endless installation of tiles from around the world tied simply with wire onto a chain-link fence. The fence surrounded a vacant lot if I recall correctly. Who put the tiles there or how this monument began I can't tell you, but I do know that wall of tiles stretched on and on and was filled with messages of hope and solidarity and remembrances of the day the towers fell. It would have been a few years old even at the time, but still very much intact and cared for, and it was reassuring to see that there are still some things too sacred to interfere with; that hope and healing were alive and well on a chain link fence in lower Manhattan.

Imagine.

- L.