September 11, 2001, by Gillian

I had signed up with Denver Museum of Nature and Science for a daylong tour of the Lakewood Brick Company on September 11th of 2001. We lived in East Denver at that time, so I left the house early for what I anticipated to be about a forty-five minute drive during the morning rush hour. I was astonished to find myself driving unimpeded along almost empty streets. Was this a holiday I had forgotten? One of those newer ones, perhaps? No. Many people were not excused work on those holidays; not enough to make for this absence of traffic. And anyway the museum would not have scheduled a tour on a holiday. I was driving my old pickup without a functioning radio, so could not get any news. I had not turned on the TV before leaving home. I was puzzled. Puzzled, but not worried. Arriving early due to this lack of traffic, I popped into King Soopers to get a snack for lunch. There was something strange about the store, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what. The few customers were standing about in small groups, talking. So, I realized, were the employees. I felt a little shiver of apprehension.

'What's going on?' I asked three women huddled together in the deli. 'Has something happened?'

That opened the floodgates. They tumbled over each other to tell me all they knew, which really was not very much. Or at least not very much for sure. Amongst all the utterances of I heard and they think and a lot of maybe this and maybe that, I gathered that a plane had been highjacked and flown into a building in New York.

'And now they think,' said one woman in a breathless whisper, 'there's another plane been highjacked, too.'

For all the lack of hard facts, clearly something really bad had happened; was happening. What to do? Should I just go back home? Were they still going to have the tour? I decided at least to check in at the Brick Company, where less than half of the scheduled number actually turned up, but we decided to go ahead with the tour as scheduled.

It simply did not work. This was before the days of everyone having a smartphone, but some had cel phones. There were constant calls home and relayings of the latest updates to the rest of us. We were all distracted, to say the least. It was the one day in our lives that we could muster absolutely no interest in the making of bricks. It took little discussion to cancel the rest of the tour and just go home.

Now we live not far from Lakewood Brick Company and pass it quite frequently. But no matter how much time passes between that terrible day and this, I never see it without feeling a lurch of my stomach. I return instantly, if only for an instant, to that feeling of nausea and fear and dread and overwhelming sadness. And if, on a very rare occasion, I find the streets unusually quiet, panic starts to grow. What's wrong? What's happened? And that's OK. I should not forget. But to me, the real tragedy of that day is what we made of it. It fills me with a despair beyond sadness. Rather than it bringing us understanding of, and even empathy for, the innocents of the world dying in their numbers everywhere every day, we used it to justify the ever-increased use of our own killing machine; to murder those same innocents. That is a tragedy truly worthy of the name.

© February 2017

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.