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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
September 11, 2005
Published as Family History
in a WIP dated September 11, 2001.
© 2001 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Statue of Liberty, 1972
© 1972 by Bud Grossmann
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WAKE-UP CALLS
Yesterday, Monday, September 10, 2001, I woke from a troubled night’s sleep and rolled on my side to read the red numerals on the clock-radio beside the bed. Here in Honolulu the time was 4:36 a.m. I got up and hiked to the bathroom to pee. Before I returned to bed, I scribbled the date and time on a message pad on the bathroom counter and jotted down a few fragments of an unprophetic dream. Later, when I tried to make sense of my notes, I was less than entirely successful.
Today, Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the phone beside my bed roused me from a more restful night’s repose. I grabbed the phone before it could ring again. In the same moment, I looked at the clock, and it showed what it had shown one day before: 4:36 a.m. “Hello,” I said, cheerily pretending to be awake, but hoping that someone had dialed our number by mistake.
Alas, I recognized the caller, a dear friend three time zones to the east, who ordered me, “Bud, get up and turn on your TV!” She hung up before I could say “Okay.”
I got out of bed, wondering what events might inspire so urgent a tone of voice. Perhaps America had gone to war. (A preposterous possibility!) Perhaps a telegenic disaster was in the works—a new eruption at Mount St. Helens, or a bombing of a building far away. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
I did not turn on a TV, and I did not pause to pee. Instead I rushed to our garage to retrieve a Walkman from my van, put on the headset, and touched a tiny toggle switch. The FM radio was tuned to NPR. But what I got at that moment was only the soothing sound of an orchestra. I flicked the switch to AM and eased the tiny, toothed tuning wheel with my fingernail until I found a reporter’s voice, brittle with exigency. Hijacked airliners had struck the World Trade Center in New York at the start of the work day, bringing both the tall towers to the ground. As many as 50,000 people were believed to have been at their desks. Another plane had crashed into the Pentagon, setting it aflame. I looked at a clock and calculated the time. On the East Coast of this nation, it was 10:41 a.m. I was five minutes into my day, but, elsewhere, horror had been heaped upon horror for hours while I slept.
I phoned my parents, at their Wisconsin farm. One ring and my father said “Hello.”
“Dad, this is Bud. Are you watching TV?”
“Yes,” he answered, in the cold, calm voice of a retired lieutenant colonel. Covering the mouthpiece, he called out, “Marjorie, it’s Buddy,” but my mother did not pick up a phone.
“Dad, what’s up?” I asked.
“Well, the buildings are rubble,” he said.
“The World Trade Center? And the Pentagon?”
“Right,” confirmed my father.
“Anything else?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Does it sound like we’re at war?”
“No...,” he said, but not with the sound of certainty that a boy would hope to hear from his dad.
I looked out a window, into the starry darkness, in the direction of Hickam Air Force Base and the naval base at Pearl Harbor. “Dad,” I said, “if they blow this island away, know that I love you and Mom. I hope you’re okay in your neighborhood.” My folks live some distance from cities of significant size. “Is Mom doing all right?” I asked.
“I think she is,” my father said.
“And you’re okay, Dad?”
“Oh, yes. I think so.”
“Good. Maybe I’ll call again, later on, today.” We said goodbye, and I went to wake my wife.
We—Frances and I—watched television for an hour, sitting on our bed, saying scarcely a word. We sometimes closed our eyes for a moment of unspoken prayer. I postponed my pilgrimage to the bathroom.
I did not cry, I’m not sure why. I tried to think who we know in New York or Washington, but my mind was mush. I phoned my brother in Fairfax, Virginia, and his former wife, in Alexandria. I reached only voice mail; I recorded my good wishes.
I tried to make another list: if we had to flee from our home (assuming we had somewhere to go), what was so precious that I’d want to bring it along? I could think of nothing in particular, except our lives themselves.
At six o’clock my daughter Elizabeth, age thirteen, was still asleep. I swiped her boom box, took it to my bathroom, and tuned in to NPR. The violins were gone; the violence was not. I turned up the volume while I showered and shaved. About seven o’clock, when I came out to our dining room, the house was hushed and still. Eliz had finished breakfast and had dressed for school. I spread my arms, and she accepted a hug, warm and full. “Did Mommy—” I began to ask.
“Yes. Mom told me,” Elizabeth replied.
“You going to be okay?”
“Yep.”
“You scared?”
“A little bit.”
“Me, too.”
Fran and Elizabeth left. I turned on three radios and the television. I wore my Walkman on my belt and spent the day in a daze.
I made some notes, I made some calls. Friends in Arlington sent an e-mail. They could smell the smoldering Pentagon. Late in the afternoon, I reached a friend who had been at her office in the Bronx, speaking on the phone with someone “across the street” from the World Trade Center when the first plane made its strike. My friend heard the explosion on the phone, and then, from her building’s roof, witnessed much of what came after.
Now it is night in New York and Washington, night here in Honolulu, too. Soon I shall go to bed, with my Walkman on my chest. A river of “updates” will murmur in my ears. I hope to wake on Wednesday, sometime later than 4:36 a.m. ♦
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