Americans of a certain age can reflect on the events of September 11th, 2001 and tell you precisely what they were doing during those morning hours. It is a defining moment for those of my generation. We have no Pearl Harbor. No grassy knoll. No man on the moon. We have 9/11. I can faintly recall the day President Regan was shot. Aside from hearing my mom cry, there's nothing particularly searing about that moment. I was young. And Regan lived. September 11th is different.
People were transfixed by indelible images of people staggering across the Brooklyn Bridge to flee the ruins of mangled steel left behind on the island of Manhattan.
By late afternoon the world bore witness to tender moments of family members posting flyers for loved ones who they would never see again. I too had felt an indescribable closeness to these people who struggled some three thousand miles away. While filled with empathy I could not help but think about myself.
My fiance and I were set to be married just a short month after all airplanes in the United Stated were grounded that September. I wondered if people would be able to fly here to San Diego. I wondered if people would want to fly here at all. I don't recall any guilt for having these selfish thoughts while so many were suffering. It didn't matter. I would soon rejoin everyone in grieving.
We were not capable of cooking dinner that night, the energy simply did not exist. Working on nine hours of uncertainty I left to get a pizza.
I stood in line and patiently waited for my order. My mind, paradoxically empty and full, drifted until the interaction between the customer in front of me and the young girl working the register caught my attention. The man complained that his order should have been ready - that he had called it in earlier- how could it not be ready? The customer continued to lay into the poor girl who stood innocently behind the counter.
My mind had now received direction and it flowed with a dialogue of fury. Everything I wanted to say to this man manifested itself in an angry one-sided conversation that only I could hear . . .
How lucky are you that you can stand in this line? Right here? Right now? There are people on the other side of this country scouring rubble for their family and you have the nerve to grouse over something as trivial as committing an extra 5 minutes of your life to this line? What some might give to be so inconvenienced. Look around. Nearly everyone is in a fog as they have been for the entire day and nobody knows what any of this means. Are we at war? You fucking asshole. Just take my pizza. Take it.
Just . . . take it.
I wanted to put my hands on his shoulders, to shake him. I wanted to slap him like Lesley Nielsen had done to the passenger who had lost her mind in 1980's Airplane.
But I didn't do these things. I only thought them. I thought those things because above all else that day was really hard. I wanted my pizza and I wanted to go home. And I was glad that I could.
Twelve years have passed and I think about that pizza every September 11th. But today was different. Today I took into consideration that maybe the ornery man standing in front of me was affected in some horrible way by the events of that day. Perhaps his family or friends lived back east and he was waiting, like we all were, for some sort of answer - and he somehow knew that no answer would be forthcoming.
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