OK, here’s mine. 24 years ago I was in a funeral home on Harrison Avenue in Panama City, Florida. It was temporarily the Bay County Association of Realtors when I was there. I say temporarily because when I was there, assessing the rooms and afectation of the interior, it was apparent that it had been a funeral home at one point. And, as is plain in the recent Google StreetView image, it is once again a funeral home.
Just before 9am we were about to start a class for about 100 Realtors coming to hear about our new MLS software. The class started at 9am eastern and I remember hearing about the first plane as I was setting up. A TV was on somewhere in the back of the maze-like building. There were lots of hallways. As we kicked off the class someone said there was another plane, another tragedy.
Intent was becoming apparent to us, there, in the room together, absorbing the news as it came in. Some people left. The rest of us shared a feeling that *they* whoever they turned out to be, wanted to interrupt our day with terror. Wanted to scare us into going home and hiding from them.
So. We had class. Normal class.
When it was over we heard about the other two. And the grounding of the airlines. So, instead of turning in my rental as usual and sleeping in a Delta RJ, I drove home, like many others. Thinking for hundreds of miles: How did we get here? Now what? I was blessed, driving across beautiful country I knew reasonably well. Because they don’t cost much more, and because it was Florida, I had rented a red convertible Mustang so driving home was not a hardship.
I think it was the right thing to do, to press on with class. And to get on the first plane that flew again out of Huntsville, when it was over, or over for a minute. Maybe the memorable thing about 9/11, now 24 years later is about the period of peace before that. You know know it was there in hindsight because there was an ending. There were periods of hot and cold war but not many people die in cold ones so they feel more like Peace. Especially to the ones who did not die. The interval between is the special part, the interval between things like 9/11.
