Tuesday
Sept. 11, 2001
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Tuesday Sept. 11, 2001 |
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terrorist |
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I was dreaming of a backyard choc-a-bloc with junk sculptures of great size. It backed up to a Mexican Restaurant patio. We were making sculptures from food. As I brushed my teeth, I heard about the first aircraft flying into the World Trade Center. I thought it was a little plane and some accident. I told FFP about it. FFP said he'd awakened to a dream about the side of a building falling off, exposing people inside. The cynic in me says that a percentage of people dreamed about falling buildings last night. Still, it's eerie. As I started my day in my home office, FFP told me there was a second plane hitting the WTC and I turned on the TV to hear about the Pentagon.
It puts the everything in perspective, doesn't it? Our little lives?
I did work. I had meetings. I practiced a presentation that I'm supposed to give in Europe in a few weeks. I wonder if it's wise to send a bunch of people to Europe. All air traffic stopped. Incredible. I send an e-mail to a friend in New York, knowing he doesn't live downtown or work there anymore. Later, he answers. His wife was in the first tower hit and got out safely.
At lunch, I went to the bank to pick up some English pounds. It seems silly to get them now. The trip in a couple of weeks seems fuzzy, improbable. SuRu and I picked something 'bad' to eat...a barbeque sandwich. What is the difference?
After work we take a walk over by Chili's and back around through the neighborhood. Around 44th Street we find a tennis ball in the street. We try to kick it home and we make it across busy 45th street and avoid a bunch of storm sewer openings. But we lose it trying to cross the 49th Street foot bridge. FFP and I eat salad. We watch the different channels by turn in different rooms. And it never starts making sense, does it? I feel I need to post my page. Now. I don't know why. Yep, I know it doesn't really matter.
As the clock moves past midnight, I am amazed. At what happened. That the lights are still on and the Internet connection available. A siren makes me jump although they are common on our street which leads to a major Austin hospital. At noon, SuRu and I saw a HazMat fire truck in route somewhere. Normally you just think a semi turned over or something. Made me jump. As we passed the elementary on Far West, we saw a bunch of kids outside under a tree a distance from the school. Later SuRu's friend e-mailed her that a bomb threat was phoned into the school. I'm not one to feel jumpy. There are always awful things happening to people. Most of us are unaffected personally. But this ripples out. Can there be that many NYC firemen dead? Night before last I was researching a trip to Washington and to New York. So many thoughts. If I'm feeling this way, I think, how must people close to it feel? It reaches beyond the personal feelings of surviving or knowing friends and love ones did not. The whole country, no the whole world, entered a new era today. People thought doomsday might lurk on January 1, 2000. September 11, 2001, though, will be I think a day that draws a line in history between then and now. I wish it weren't so. I wish I would wake up and find normal. That everyone's world would be as peaceful as this neighborhood is at the moment.
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book for sale on ebay...since September 5
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many people have a travel photo showing a skyline that will never be again |
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My dream.
Only a handful of you, among all my friends, would believe or appreciate
this story. I swear that it is true and I feel the need to tell it. I
am not making this up. Please believe me.
This morning I dreamed that I was involved in a business operation in a
small building located in the 4200 block of Medical Parkway where my
grandparents’ house used to be. I was standing outside the office with
three of my co-workers and we were talking about some business matter.
Then I turned and looked down the street at a twelve story building
located about a block away, where the Draft Horse tavern is in reality.
As I was watching the building, all of a sudden, the exterior walls were
peeled off as if by a giant hand. It appeared as if the bricks on the
outer skin of the building were a piece of flypaper—like in a cartoon.
Just the framework of the building remained. As my colleagues and I
looked on in amazement, we were being stared back at by the shocked
office workers in the building.
One of my co-workers said, “Do you think we should go help them?”
I
said that sure, we should walk over there and yell up at them, see if
they’re all right, etc.
As we took a couple of steps in their direction, the building started to
topple and fell across the street, sending massive plumes of debris into
the air. Part of the building with people lodged in it landed across
from us and I yelled into our office for someone to call 911. Then we
ran towards to the building to try and drag people out. But when we got
near them, it was like there was a transparent surface across the
openings in the debris and we couldn’t reach in and grab the injured
people. I banged and banged on the glasslike surface and I finally fell
to the ground in frustration. I guess that I must have been jerking
around in my real body, because I woke myself up at that point. I
squinted and looked at the bedside clock—it was little after 5:00 a.m.
So help me, as I laid there thinking about what a weird dream that was,
I remembered when during the first year we were married, Linda had a
dream of such intensity that she sprang out of bed, whispering to me in
fright that she needed to call her mother. It turned out that her
mother had been told she needed to have a serious operation and was
going to call Linda later that morning. Now I felt like I had an urge
-- more like a feeling of obligation -- to call someone, but I didn’t
know who or why.
After laying there in the dark for a while, I snuggled up to Linda and
went back to sleep, hoping I wouldn’t revisit that awful scenario. Of
course, when I got up I found out the same news all the rest of you
did. It took me about thirty seconds to realize the significance of
that dream and how indisputably strange it was that I had it. Linda is
the one who usually recounts her dreams. It was very unusual that I
would have one so strong that I would remember it.
Most of you know that I tend to be pretty cynical and that I take a
hard-nosed view of reality. This sequence of events is making me ask
what’s out there in some other dimension.
Thanks for listening.
Forrest
182
JUST
TYPING