Wind and remembrances

It's windy. It's so windy we lost our power for a good part of this afternoon and evening.

The day was bright and sunny and clear -- almost but not quite like Sept 11th of last year. I was glad for the clouds in the sky: it was just enough different a sky that I wasn't as spooked as I would have been otherwise.

Hearing planes today spooked me. We're close enough to an alternate landing path for the Manchester airport that they can come in rather low over the lake.

I didn't get out of bed after the first plane of the day sounded overhead. I pulled the covers up, decided to take the day off, felt for the cat asleep next to my right calf, and went back to sleep. Until 3pm. Elric did try to get me up. He did try. Many times. After the umpteeth try, I finally woke enough to tell him I was unofficially taking the day off, so he'd stop cajolling me. He left me to sleep and returned to his copyediting downstairs.

After the air conditioner went off because of the power outage at 3pm, I got up. The lack of sound is what woke me, I guess.
I puttered, drank cold coffee (leftover from one aborted attempt to wake me), and read past issues of WIRED magazine that I haven't had time to read lately. I haven't had time to read anything for pleasure for almost a year now. Today was a day to take the time for small pleasures, to remind me what is important in life.

Living is what's important.

Someone I knew Sept 10th 2001 was no longer alive by Sept 11th. I didn't know him well -- he was one of the bosses of a friend of mine, and we'd met a couple of times at either trade shows or when he showed up once at a convention with some employees. But Danny is no longer alive. He was on a plane from Boston to LA. Yes, he's one of the ones who had time to call his wife. I don't want to say more on the subject. There's not much else to say, other than wondering what went through Danny's mind during those few minutes he had at the end is not something any of us will ever know. And perhaps dwelling on it will never do any good. I can hope that Danny had peace at the end, knowing the end was literally in sight.

A bunch of someones I knew Sept 10th 2001 are still alive Sept 11th 2002. One worked in the WTC doing radio recordings: he should have been there on 9/11, but had instead worked late the night before and decided upon returning home to Brooklyn to not bother going in that Tuesday, and slept late, instead. One was headed out the subway in the Financial District and was walking towards the WTC area when the first plane hit. She ducked into a nearby building and safely evacuated when able. If she had been "on time," she would have bee directly under the towers when they fell -- instead, she had been early for unexplicable reasons. One was driving over the bridge and saw a plane headed low and fast toward lower Manhattan. She related the day after 9/11/01 that she thought at the time, "Shit! Someone heading into Newark is really messed up."

One, a dear friend and the person who brought me to LiveJournal, lives in an apartment building that used to be in the shadow of the WTC, in Battery Park City. She is a survivor -- one of those who watched it happen above her head, one of those covered in debris from the buildings, one of those who survived by grace. One of those who watched it all in front of her nose.

She lived with us for six weeks (more? I can't even remember anymore -- she was like my sister, living here, fitting in perfectly), with her cats, when she couldn't go back home. She was homeless.

And she brought the events of 9/11, the concentration of what happened that day, into my house. Into my life. It was, is, so vivid to me, because of her presence in my life.

Today I have felt the heightened tremors of her experience in my life all over again. There is no way to explain it other than to emphasize the immediacy of it all.

Now that I'm awake, I'm unable to sleep.

(reposted from my LiveJournal for 9/11/01)
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Go see Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog for 9/10/01, "Coming up on a year."