My dad, who was disabled following three strokes, in 1991, 1997, and 1998, had nurses who arrived each morning about 8:00 a.m. to get him up. They had the same routine every day, set him in the armchair with CNN on. This was before I got a white noise machine so the TV would sometimes partly wake me up. First thing I heard was about a plane, and bodies. Oh, I thought, a plane crash, that's terrible, and went back to sleep. Next I heard two planes, lots of bodies. I thought, two passenger planes must have collided, that's terrible, how could they let such a thing happen? I was asleep or partly asleep when I heard the anchor say about the towers of the World Trade Center, "they are no longer there."
It was the third time in my life I came awake that fast. The first was when my sister got a phone call that John Lennon had been shot, the second was when the same sister turned on CNN and I heard that debris of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane had been found, but no bodies. On September 11 I went from almost sound asleep to wide awake running for the TV. Due to his strokes and medications, Dad had some difficulties speaking and was struggling to say, rather faintly and breathlessly, that we had suffered a terrible disaster.
Of course we had to call relatives back east, particularly in New York. At last we received a call back from my cousin that her older brother was at home and did not realize anything was happening until he looked out a window and saw one of the towers collapse. He grabbed his son, who was about a year old, and he and his wife had to hike out of town across a bridge packing a baby. They later moved to a place where they were much happier.
Four days later was the local historical festival at the restored train depot, a very subdued gathering with people huddled in little knots speaking softly. Owners of the Abraham Lincoln, a Pullman car which belonged to Abraham Lincoln's son Robert Todd Lincoln, had brought it. A local pastor who did historical reenactments stood on the car's platform and gave the Gettysburg Address. You could have heard a pin drop. I took pictures which I posted on the wall next to Dad's bed. Dad is now gone along with my friends Steve Edwards, George McCoy, and others with whom I spoke at the festival, but the pictures are there to this day.