Where were you?

For my grandparents, the question is, "Where were you when Pearl Harbor happened?"

For my parents the question is, "Where were you when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated?"

For my generation the question is, "Where were you on 9/11?"

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Being on the west coast, we were still sleeping, blissfully ignorant, when it all happened.

We got up about 7 AM (PDT) and began our morning. We don't generally have the TV on in the mornings, as most people we know (otherwise someone would have called us). I was getting the kids up and my husband left for work. I began getting the kids ready for the day, our oldest had just started kindergarten.

A few minutes after my husband left, he called me. He had turned the radio on in the car and heard. He said, "Something is happening.". I said "Like what?"

"I think we're under attack." He was so matter-of-fact, I wasn't sure what he meant.

"What do you mean?" I asked. Nothing prepared me for what he said next.

"I don't know, but the World Trade center in New York and the Pentagon blew up or something." I easily remembered the previous attempt to destroy the WTC from a few years back. I got a chill.

The kids were still in their rooms, so I somewhat reluctantly turned on CNN. I stood, frozen in silence, for probably 2 minutes. I didn't like not having known until now what had happened, but because it had been several hours, it was nice in a way. By that time the reporters seemed to feel the attacks were over.

I turned Nickelodeon on for the kids in the kitchen so I could continue to watch CNN in the living room. I didn't want my 5 year old to hear or see any of this. I didn't know what I would tell him. Our other son wasn't even 2 yet, but our 5 year old, sensitive in every way, would have been traumatized by these events, even at the level he could understand them.

[Incidentally I now often turn CNN on in the mornings now when I'm on the treadmill. I think it's the result of the fear of "not knowing", like on that morning 5 years ago.]

Then I thought about kindergarten. "Should I take him to school?", I thought. I imagined all sorts of horrible scenarios.

My next thought was, "Is this the end of the world?". I guess that was a rather prideful thought. People in other parts of the world deal with this kind of thing every day. But when it happens to America, it must be the end of everything. After all, if someone can attack us on our own soil, which is so nearly unimaginable, then there is no predicting what else might happen.

After about half-an-hour, I called my husband. I distinctly remember saying to him (because at this time there was still so much confusion as to what had happened) "If this thing escalates at all, will you come home right away?" My husband works 25 miles away from home, all the way across the Portland Metro area. It takes him about 50 minutes to commute on a good day, 2 hours on a bad one. I worried that if anything else happened, he might not be able to get home.

Then I asked him if I should send our son to school. He said "Oh, I think so." In some strange way, I was relieved. If my husband was felt we were safe, things must be OK. Not great, not normal. But OK.

Like for millions of people everywhere, when it first began to come into focus, everything changed for me. Suddenly I realized that we were no longer living in before. We were now living in after.

I took my son to school and returned home. I called my mom. I just needed to talk to her, process with her. She told me something I had forgotten: my Dad was in Houston. He was supposed to fly home later that day. With all the flights grounded, he obviously wouldn't be coming home.

My Dad had been at a business conference with his partner. They had just started a company together, it was fledgling, and not knowing how long they might be stranded in Houston, they needed to get home. They decided to take matters into their own hands. My Dad's partner's son-in-law worked for a car-rental company and could get them a deal, so they decided to drive home from Houston. My Dad videotaped their adventure, which was interesting for the whole family, because the world had changed and our perspective had changed. The scenery was suddenly more beautiful, more peaceful. It took them about 2 1/2 days, and by the end, their rental car was ankle deep in food wrappers and coffee cups and sunflower seed shells and soda cans and whatever else. I think it was a humorous rebellion against the stress of 9/11. "We can't control the world, but we can control our environment. And if it's funny to litter the floor of the car, then damnit, it'll be funny and we'll laugh about it." I don't know if that makes sense to anyone, but in those first few days, I think we were all a little psycho. We worried about my Dad those 2 days, just because we were having to rebalance ourselves and our sense of security in post-9/11 America. But they arrived safely, with an adventure under their belts.

The other thing I really vividly remember is the silence. We live in the immediate flight path of Portland International Airport. We hear planes dozens of times each day. We are generally deaf to it, it's just a part of the background noise of our neighborhood. Even as I type this, there is a plane flying overhead. But when, in those first 3 days, that background noise was absent everything seemed eerily silent. We would go out on our deck in the late afternoon and say "It's so quiet. That's so strange." Without that sound of air travel, it was almost as if the world had ended. When the flights resumed, it was such an amazing, reassuring, secure sound. It was saying, "OK, life will go on. America has resumed control of her airspace. They have not defeated us."

Now life has gone on.

We have heard all the stories, we have watched the documentaries. We have remembered the heroes: firefighters, police, private citizens. Innocent people on flights of terror. We have heard of babies being born to fathers they will never know. We have heard of painful and panicked last phone calls to loved ones, made by people who knew they were going to die.

We saw the footage of a tsunami of dust. We have heard the voices: on the streets of New York, on cellphones, on police and fire department radios. We saw the wall of faces, posted as missing people. We saw Peter Jennings cry on-air. We saw Jay Leno rendered nearly speechless.

We saw an uprising of solidarity, neighbor to neighbor, American to American, but also nation to nation. We talked to people in our community that we had never spoken to before. We heard Congress sing "God Bless America" on the steps of the Capitol. We heard the American National Anthem played at Buckingham Palace.

We saw people send booties for the feet of the search-and-rescue dogs working at the site. We saw people bring food and drinks for the workers. We saw an image of firefighters raising an American flag in the rubble of the Twin Towers.

And time went by.

Now, life has gone on. We have taken our kids to baseball. We have had the flu. We have moved, changed jobs, had a baby, retired. We have buried loved ones, we have prayed and wept.

Let's not go on with our lives too easily. Let's take a minute to remember the sights, the sounds, the people. Let's educate our children about this day. Let's be still for a moment tommorrow, to remember the voices that were permanently silenced that day.

Let's take a minute to pray that the Nation will never forget the unity we felt in those first days, weeks, months. Let's pray we learn to be more united than divided.