9/11 2008

I know I'm not the first person today to think it's amazing it's been 7 years since that shocking morning in 2001. Who would have thought on that day that 7 years later we'd be bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan? The Bush presidency had barely begun on that day. And now it is almost over.

That shocking day began for me with a phone call, telling me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Since the caller was in Dallas at the time, I thought he was referencing the Dallas World Trade Center, which is not all that far from Love Field.

When I turned on the TV I was shocked to see it was the New York City World Trade Towers, just as the second plane struck the second tower.

As soon as I realized how bad this was I began waking people up on the west coast. I didn't tell them what had happened, just that they needed to turn on their TVs. I remember calling my little sister back and saying I didn't think she should go into work that morning. She worked, at the time, in one of Seattle's tallest towers.

About a month after 9/11 a friend from up north, Nancy, came down here. When I picked her up at D/FW I asked if she was hungry. She was. So we went to the Fort Worth Stockyards to find Mexican food. It was deserted. It took awhile, post 9/11, for places like the Stockyards to get back to normal.

A couple weeks after Nancy was here my mom and dad showed up for a week long visit. The Stockyards had picked up by then. Go here and the first photo is my mom watching my dad take a picture of the Fort Worth Herd. I thought I had a picture there of my dad with barbecue sauce all over while eating ribs at Riscky's BBQ. That must be somewhere else. I have too many webpages to keep track of.

While mom and dad were here my mom called my sister who now lives in Phoenix, but then lived in Washington. My nephew, Jeremy answered. He was home alone and scared. The war in Afghanistan had begun. It was his first exposure to such a thing where he was old enough to know it's serious. Jeremy must have been 13 or 14 at the time.

I got back here in Fort Worth a few days before 9/11. I'd driven myself up to Seattle the month before. Best roadtrip ever. Thousands of miles alone with no one to bug me about being hungry or needing a restroom. On the way north gas was $1.17 in Amarillo. When I returned a month later it was $1.39. When I moved to Texas in 1998, OH GOOD GAWD, it's been 10 years, gas was $.77 a gallon in Amarillo. 77 cents!