This time eight years ago, we were still holding vigil on Shawn’s living room floor. It occurred to us, at the end of the day, that none of us had eaten breakfast. Well, except for the baby, who was still being bottle-fed.

Brian and I nipped across the street to the chicken joint to pick up an order of barbecue and fries for everyone. I remember standing in line with him, waiting for the food. I remember the TV above the counter being on, tuned to the same terrible images we had been absorbing all day. I was a little tipsy; we’d been drinking Bloody Marys since noon. The towers fell again on the screen bolted to the wall. Again and again they fell; it never varied. There was no happy ending.

It didn’t sink in that day. It actually took till the first anniversary to really hit me. I was working in my office in Glasgow, and the big screen in the office lobby was showing the memorials from the crash sites. Names were called. Ring the bell. Another name. A voice came over our intercom system, advising a moment of silence marking the fall of the first tower. Ring the bell. On and on it went… so many names. Because of the 5 hour time difference, I left the office for the day before the bell stopped ringing. I was spent. I was gutted. I finally understood what had happened that day in 2001.

And still the bell rang.

My thoughts from 2006, the 5th anniversary:

I have cut ties to those who parrot the they deserved it nonsense. The girl I spent September 11th with, my very best friend on the whole planet (and probably other planets, though I haven’t checked) - we don’t talk anymore. We’re too different. She hates America. Hates Bush. And I guess she must hate me, too, because of the turns my own emotions and life have taken since the fall of the Towers. I have chosen to face the demons sent by the desert devil, and use my loud voice to decry their presence among us. She has chosen to take her news from Jon Stewart and bury her head from that which is real and frightening.

Today I understand how she feels.

Last night I sat riveted to Twitter (of all things), watching Allahpundit recount his memories of September 11th, 140 characters at a time. Andy Levy compiled these tweets and they are now up at Hot Air.

Eight years ago, I remember opening my eyes at 8:46 a.m. in my downtown Manhattan apartment because…

…I thought a truck had crashed in the street outside

I remember pacing my apartment for the next 15 minutes thinking, stupidly, that a gas line might have been hit in the North Tower…

…and then I heard another explosion. I hope no one ever hears anything like it.

All I can say to describe it is: Imagine the sound of thousands of Americans screaming on a city street

Peggy Noonan talks to those who have come of age in a post-9/11 world. Her annual post is something I look forward to.

It was a life-splitting event. Before it they were carefree, after they were careful. A 20-year-old junior told me that after 9/11, “a backpack on a subway was no longer a backpack,” and a crowded theater was “a source for concern.” Every one of them used the word “bubble”: the protected bubble of their childhood “popped.” And all of them said they spent 9/11 and the days after glued to the television, watching over and over again the footage—the north tower being hit by the plane, the fireball. The video of 9/11 has firmly and ineradicably entered their brains. Which is to say their first visual memory of America, or their first media memory, was of its towers falling down.

Gates of Vienna has the best post I’ve read all day. Everything Changed:

After eight years that hole in ground in Lower Manhattan is still there. That’s more than twice as long as it took America to mobilize, rearm, go to war, and defeat Nazi Germany and Japan in World War Two.

In the eight years following John F. Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon, the United States went from having no manned space program, though designing and testing the Mercury and Apollo spacecrafts, to a successful landing on the moon.

The original Word Trade Center took six years to complete, from the ground-breaking to the ribbon-cutting.

In the past eight years we have seen plenty of candlelight vigils with teddy bears and flowers and tearful remembrances by the relatives of the slain.

But there’s still a hole in the ground where the Twin Towers used to be.

His post is long, but very well worth the time it will take to read it.

Debbie has a 2996 post at Right Truth:

But perhaps today is not the time to get into these matters.  Today is a time to simply remember…

So we remember Lee Adler and all 2,996 whose lives were taken from them and their families on September 11, 2001.

It’s Time to Sing Some Praises:

When was the last time you thought about a fireman? A policeman? An EMT? Why not take a moment today to do that?

Eight years ago today terror came to our doorstep, and a certain breed of men and women raced toward it to help their fellow man.  In the weeks and months following 9/11, people embraced emergency workers all across the country, even if they were near Ground Zero, they were all brothers and sisters, and people remembered these people that work tirelessly in the backgrounds of our lives.

Ephemeral Isle will Never Forget:

Eight years ago, a group of murderers bent on destroying our civilisation ploughed two planes full of passengers into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon, and a third crashed in a field in New England thanks to the heroic efforts of the passengers who saved the Capitol or the White House from a similar fate. In all, some 3000 people were murdered. It wasn’t the first shot in this war. That happened with the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, but it is the first where we recognised that we were at war.

United 93 Tribute, Shanksville PA

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 4:40 pm and is filed under September 11. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.