9/11

One day, soon after, someone got in the cab and said something about a plane flying into the World Trade Center. There is a building in Norfolk called the World Trade Center so I thought maybe a small, private plane had lost control and crashed into it. I asked if it was our local building or the one in New York City. The person wasn’t sure.

I had to pick up my next fare at a doctor’s office so I went in to get them and there on the TV was the World Trade Center in New York. At that point they didn’t know it was terrorists so it just looked like a tragic accident, which was stunning enough.

I picked up my passenger and we turned on the radio to listen to the live coverage. When the second building got hit, everyone started to realize that this was no accident. It was a slow period of the day so fares were sporadic. I continued to listen to the news and heard when the first building fell. My mind was reeling. Then the second one fell. If I picked up someone who hadn’t heard yet, I told them. If they had heard, we expressed our dismay. 

Laura was busy at home with the children so she typically did not turn on any media. I called to let her know. That night I watched the tragic images on TV. I had been to the top of one of the towers with the King’s Kids group back in ’87 and I just imagined if it had happened when we had been up there. I imagined if we would have been rescued by helicopter or would I have been one of the ones that jumped because the agonizing heat.

We found out that my mother-in-law was in New Jersey and there was a possibility that she could have been on one of the planes bound for San Francisco. Fortunately, she was one of the ones stranded instead when they shut down all air travel.

Over the next days and weeks, the tragedy was never far from our minds. The most central and busiest cab stand was in the Pembroke area of Virginia Beach. Virginia Beach is pretty much a suburban city except for the Oceanfront. But they decided to try to turn the Pembroke area into a more downtown atmosphere. There was one taller building, about eight stories tall. Now they were building one about three times that height, with more to follow. 

As I waited at the stand, I watched them working away on the building and just imagined a plane suddenly flying into it. That one incident made the world seem out of control. Then a slogan showed up that helped people to focus.

The slogan was “work and win”. It was designed to help us as a nation not let the terrorists win by causing chaos and making us fall apart. It helped motivate us to stay strong by not letting it destroy our confidence, by encouraging us to continue to work hard and keep this nation steady. It was a good slogan.

I also saw a notable symbol of America’s strength one day when I was on the road. I was on one of the busier roads in Virginia Beach when I came upon stopped traffic. Up ahead I could see a school bus stopped on the side of the road. As I looked at all the cars backed up and waiting, it struck me how, in this chaotic world where people fly planes into buildings, the United States is a society run by the rule of law. People stop for a school bus with flashing red lights so that our children don’t get hurt. It was such a graphic symbol of order in the midst of such seeming chaos.


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