Five Years Ago Today ...

… I was sitting in a hotel room in Atlanta, Georgia, talking on the phone long-distance to Mexico, trying desperately to convince my Canadian lady-friend of the enormity of what had happened that morning in the United States.

She was a little slow to come around. That’s perfectly understandable, however. She hadn’t heard anything about it, and I must have sounded absolutely crazy while I was describing it—not to mention that the events I was describing were, in fact, crazy. I had experienced her point of view, myself, a few hours earlier, on the plane.

My friend and I had planned a (potentially romantic) adventure together in Mexico to celebrate her fiftieth birthday and our fifteen-year reunion. She’d gone down to Mexico from Ontario the day before; I’d been supposed to meet her there. My plane took off from Baltimore, right on time, bright and early on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001. It's creepy … my plane's departure time was 8:58 A.M., right in between the times when the planes hit the two towers in New York. My fellow passengers and I knew nothing about it, of course. We flew south, over Washington, and passed just to the west of the Pentagon. I could see it from my window seat. I even turned to the guy sitting next to me and said, "Look … there's the Pentagon!" Forty-five minutes later, terrorists crashed a 757 into it.

Forty-five minutes after that, our pilot came on the intercom and told us that we were being forced to land in Atlanta. He spoke in that cool, slick, happy-as-a-clam pilot's voice. "There's apparently some kind of terrorist activity in New York," he crooned, as if he were giving the weather report, "And the Federal government has grounded all planes in the United States." We landed in Atlanta. (While we were landing, the pilot actually said, "We'd like to welcome you to the Atlanta area … thank you for flying Continental Airlines!" It was all I could do to keep from shouting, "To hell with that!! I wanna go to Mexico!!")

As soon as the plane was parked at the gate, the stewardess got on the intercom and became hysterical. "They've attacked the Pentagon!" she screamed, "And both of the World Trade Center buildings have fallen down—down to the ground!!" She sounded crazy—I didn't believe it for a moment. I thought she was out of her mind. I remember thinking, "How unprofessional of her to say those things on the P.A. system!" Then, inside the terminal, every TV screen in every waiting area was showing the video-clips of the towers collapsing. It was the most shocking thing I'd ever seen.

The Atlanta airport is gigantic, and thousands of airline passengers had been grounded there. I tried calling home, but the long-distance phone lines were grid-locked. I called an operator and asked to place a call to Mexico, and she laughed at me. Local calls worked, and it was a good thing. With the help of the Yellow Pages, I found a nearby hotel with a vacancy. I was lucky to find it—the airport's information desk was telling everyone that all the hotels in the city were booked. I made a reservation and then went and stood in the line of people waiting for taxi cabs. It ran the entire length of our terminal at Hartsfield airport and wrapped around its far corner.

The first several hours in my hotel room were spent desperately trying to call my friend in Mexico. The whole time, pictures of the devastation in New York played over and over on the television. One of the most terrifying images was of people running down the street trying to escape from the huge cloud of dust that billowed up when the first tower fell. I eventually managed to get through to Mexico and get my friend on the phone. When she answered, I said flatly, "I'm in Atlanta." I figured she must know all about the catastrophe.

She hadn't heard a word about it. "What are you doing in Atlanta??" she asked. "You're supposed to be here in half an hour!"

I couldn't believe that she hadn't heard about what was going on in the States. It's not as if she were in Bora-Bora … Puerto Vallarta is (these days) a big, modern tourist city. "Well …" I sputtered, "It's because of the terrorists!!"

"What are you talking about?"

"The terrorists! In New York! Every airliner in the United States was grounded! There's not a single plane in the air! All the airports are closed! The World Trade Center has been destroyed! Both towers! They also attacked the Pentagon!" It occurred to me that I must have sounded crazy … just like the stewardess on the airplane.

My friend must have thought so, too, because there was dead silence on the other end of the phone. After a few seconds, she said, "Look, if you don't want to come, why don't you just say so?"

As awful as the events of 9/11 were, I laugh out loud every time I remember her saying that. I wasn't laughing at that moment, however. I finally convinced her to turn her television on. She was instantly bombarded with images of the terrorist attack, and then she believed me. I’ve never blamed her for not believing me … after all, I hadn’t believed the stewardess, either.

I was stuck in Atlanta for the rest of the week. For five days, I tried valiantly to get to Mexico. Every day, I would call the airlines and book the flight, and every day, the flights were cancelled. I spent hours and hours each day sitting in that hotel room and talking to my friend on the telephone. She wound up spending the entire week in Mexico by herself. She was alone in a foreign country on her fiftieth birthday. It was Saturday when I was finally able to book a flight back to Baltimore. I had used up all that remained of my paid time off. The hotel bill was $950—$400 for the room, and $550 for the phone calls to Mexico. My friend flew back to Ontario on Sunday. So much for our romantic adventure.

Oh, well … as my friends keep telling me, at least I wasn't killed by terrorists.

The news channels are spending the day today broadcasting memorial events and showing video clips of that terrible day. I can't watch them … they make me too uncomfortable. 9/11 still feels too recent, and I have too much residual confusion and anger over it. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not talking about my spoiled vacation. (I got over that a long time ago.) I'm talking about the attack, itself, and all of its implications. There's anger and sadness on behalf of the thousands of innocent victims, and there's sympathy and pride over all of the heroics of the day. There's anger and disgust at the role that religious superstition and intolerance played. There's even dismay over the loss of that icon of the New York skyline.

But I'm also deeply troubled about the problems with our own nation and our own culture, problems that seem to make it difficult for us to coexist with other cultures—that is, without assimilating them into our own. Many would argue that in general, the United States is a peaceful and generous nation. It is—but mostly to those who submit to being Westernized and becoming a part of the machine that serves Western material greed. America is "the Borg" of cultures. Too often, our "generosity" translates to You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Despite its benefits and advantages, some people don't want to be assimilated by the Western capitalist Borg. No, I'm not blaming the United States for 9/11. I'm not excusing the terrorists, either. I'm simply saying that with all the anger, resentment, and hatred being directed at us by much of the rest of the world, maybe it’s time we considered the reasons.

Anyway, with all of those thoughts and feelings bouncing around in my head, I'm disinclined to watch the 9/11 retrospectives on TV. They don't seem to address the events in a way that helps me to deal with them. Maybe someday, I’ll get over those discomforts, as well. Meanwhile, let us hope and pray that the world continues to be a place in which anyone who describes such events sounds crazy … and a place in which anyone who hears such descriptions doesn’t believe them.

[Where were you? Feel free to post your own 9/11 stories in comments.]

[That's all, folks]