FROM THE V&B TIME CAPSULE​ -
       NONFICTION  -  A SELECTION FROM ISSUE 1 - FALL 2015

"There was fire, smoke and sirens, and people covered
with soot and jumping from buildings."

                                           Photo by Weebly.com                                    

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I Slept Through 9 - 11
by  Charlene Anderson

The phone woke me at six AM.  I jumped up and stumbled into the living room.  “Hello.”

A flurry of words, apparently in Japanese.

“I can’t understand you.  Speak English, please.”

Another batch of hurried words, not one of them English.

“You have the wrong number.  I’m hanging up now.”

More incomprehensible words.  I shook my head, clicked off and staggered back to bed.

Back then, I started work at ten, so I kept my alarm set for eight, though I usually woke up much earlier.  But after that interruption, that morning I slept right through till the alarm buzzed.  I was groggy when I woke that second time, so I decided to “finish” waking up by watching TV in bed.

I switched on one of the network stations.  A man was standing alone in front of what appeared to be a pile of rubble.  “Two planes crashed into the Twin Towers, another into the Pentagon and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania,” he recounted in an even voice.

I squinted at him.  Nothing was happening around him that he could be describing, so I quickly “realized” he was giving a promo for a made-for-TV-movie to be aired that night.   “I do some writing,” I mumbled at the man in my empty room.  “That’s no way to do it—you’re giving too much of the plot away.”

“All the planes in the country are to be grounded,” he continued in the same restrained voice.  “There will be no more takeoffs and any planes still in the air will be grounded at the closest airport and monitored as they land.”

A shiver jagged up my spine.  “Oh, my God.  This can’t be a TV movie.  Even this lamebrain wouldn’t give the entire plot away.” 

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I switched to another channel, and another.  Nobody on any of the other channels was the least bit restrained.  There was fire, smoke and sirens, and people covered with soot and jumping from buildings.  There were words, “Terror attack,” “thousands dead,” “Ground Zero,” “Flight 93,” and I understood every damned one of their words.  That Japanese man who’d woken me had obviously “told” me what had happened too, but I couldn’t understand any of his.

Like everybody else that day and for many days after, I was shocked, horror-stricken, outraged, saddened, and mournful.  I went through all of that right along with everybody else.  But secretly, I harbored another feeling.  Because I hadn’t experienced any of the attack in “real time,” which on any other morning I almost certainly would have, and had only heard about it after the fact, by way of that placid journalist standing beside a no-longer even smoldering pile of rubble--guilty though it made me feel and petty though I knew it was, I also felt deprived.

In the fall of 2011, I met my Swedish friend Eva in London.  I hadn’t seen her for years, so we spent a lot of time catching up while simultaneously working on hitting all the art museums in the city.  On Saturday night, two days before we were scheduled to fly to Sweden to meet up with her husband and daughter, she said, “I’ve always wanted to see St. Paul’s Cathedral.  If you go during the week, you have to take a tour which costs £17, but the Sunday service is free.  It’s close to the Tate Modern and, since we haven’t seen that one yet, we could go there afterwards.”

The service started at ten and we got there about nine-forty-five, only to find the place surrounded by barricades and swarming with police.  “What’s going on?” I asked one of the neatly dressed and innocuous looking Bobbies. 

“There’s a special memorial service at eleven for the tenth anniversary of September 11,” he said, “so the usual ten o’clock Sunday service has been cancelled.”  He shook his head as if he felt personally responsible for disrupting our plans.

I blinked.  “I didn’t even remember that it is September 11,” I said, surprised at my strange lapse of memory.

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Eva and I exchanged glances.  “Yeah, I guess we’ll go then,” Eva said.

I felt a twinge and suddenly didn’t want to give up so easily.  “Uh, could we attend the memorial service?” I asked the cop.

He shook his head.  “You have to have a ticket.”

“A ticket?  For a memorial service?  How much does it cost and where do we buy them?”

He still looked regretful.  “The tickets are free but you have to get them in advance, so it’s too late for that.”

Eva was turning to go.  I felt suddenly crestfallen, as though, ten years later, I was missing out again. 

The cop looked at me.  “There is one possibility,” he said.  “Over there,” he indicated a spot on one side of the immense courtyard behind the church, “there’ll be a queue opening up soon for people who don’t have tickets.  You should be aware, though, that the ticketholders will be let in first and if they fill the Cathedral, you won’t get in anyway.”

Eva was scowling.  “I’d like to go to the museum now,” she said.  “I don’t want to wait in an enormous line for probably no reason at all.”

My stomach did a flop.  “I really need to do this,” I told her.  “It’s important to me.”

She looked surprised and curious but didn’t say anything.

I glanced quickly around and noticed something on the far side of the courtyard.  “Look,” I said, “there’s a Starbucks.  We could have coffee while we wait.”

“I hate Starbucks,” she said.  “Well, actually, I’ve never been to one.  But it’s a chain, an American chain, and I don’t like chains and do my best to avoid them.”

I laughed.  She could be a pill when she wanted to be.  “It is a chain,” I acknowledged, “but unlike many American corporations and chains, Starbucks was founded by and is run by Democrats.  They contribute to Democratic candidates and causes.”

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“I don’t care about American politics,” she said, still stone-faced.  “Or rather, I do care to the extent that I disapprove of the wars your country started in the name of 9-11.”

I nodded.  “I understand what you’re saying,” I said.  “But for me, this isn’t about what happened after 9-11, it’s about the experience itself, which was horrific.  And I-I’m a traumatized American and I need to do this, or at least try.”

She gave me another pointed look but again didn’t say anything.

I waved my finger at her.  “And as for you, Eva, you lived in the U.S. for two years and have American friends, like good ole me.  Plus, you’re married to an American.  So how can you pretend not to care about us at all?”

She smiled, and some of the ice broke.  “As you know, Bill is an expat,” she said, “but okay, I’ll go to Starbucks, and what a tale I’ll have to tell back home.  My friends will be appalled.”

I laughed.  We thanked the helpful policeman and headed for Starbucks.  I had my usual tall decaf caramel Frappuccino and Eva had coffee.  She said it was bad.  I didn’t care.  My eyes were glued on that one spot beside the small gate where the queue was to form.

After what seemed an inordinately long time, a guy sauntered up to the gate and set up a card table, and people immediately started straggling up to it.  “Let’s go,” I said, and headed for the door.

We stood there while the line grew, though it never got very long.  I guess there aren’t many latecomers in London.  At last, they opened the big gate.  “The ticketholder’s line stretches around the block,” somebody in my mini-line lamented.  It didn’t sound good, but there was no way I was giving up now.

The ticketholders filed in in a long arc from the far side of the courtyard which must have been two city blocks away.  They were dressed beyond the nines.  The men were well-turned out in fashionable suits and the women wore elegant dresses and coats and of course classic British hats.  Everybody carried flowers, wreaths and Bibles.  I stood there in my garish Macy’s (yes, another American chain, Eva) hot pink raincoat and watched them go, hoping, praying the seemingly endless parade would end.

It took a long time.  There were so many people, I was almost ready to give it up.  But then the main gates closed and our gate opened.  I held my breath while the ten people ahead of us moved past the passport checkers sitting behind more card tables.  Finally, Eva and I reached the tables, a clerk checked our passports and, with a restrained English smile, waved us in.

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We walked up the long steps of the Cathedral with the honor guard on each side.  I felt honored, touched.  They were honoring us.  They cared about us.

Of course, being lowly non-ticketholders, we were seated on folding chairs at the back of the church.  I didn’t care.  We were in.  That’s all that mattered.  I don’t recall much of what was said, but I didn’t really care about that either.  As we were leaving, Eva smiled and patted me on the back.  “Do you feel better?” she asked.

My eyes were misty.  “I do,” I said, and sighed.  “I feel like 9-11 is finally over.”

We crossed the bridge and went to the Tate Modern.  I hated it, the only museum in London I couldn’t stand.  I didn’t mind that either.  I’d finally experienced the ending of a chapter.  It was September 11 revisited, changed into something I didn’t miss out on and, most importantly, that had some healing power and not just horror in it.

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​Charlene Anderson is a San Francisco resident and member of OLLI at SF State. She taught Freshman Composition at, and received a Master's degree in English Literature from Purdue University. After working at the Indianapolis Public Library for some time, she moved to San Francisco and worked at UCSF for over 30 years, most recently as a grant analyst managing a large NIH grant. She wrote and co-published a novel entitled, Berkeley's Best Buddhist Bookstore, and recently completed a novella, The Only Road in Sight. She has been a member of the OLLI Writers' Circle for over two years. 

Editor's Note:  Charlene was in the group of OLLI members who started Vistas & Byways in Fall 2015.  She has served as Managing Editor and Process Coordinator for many of the subsequent years. Thank you, Charlene, for helping our Editorial and Production Staff keep on track!  You can learn more about Charlene by reading Barbara Barer's interview with Charlene in the Inside OLLI section of this Issue 20.

Other works in this issue:
Poetry
​The Trouble with Time
All Aboard

Photo Essay
Mississippi: A River Out of Time

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