I have the good fortune to live in a coastal community in Maine. It offers peace, quiet, and beauty. People move here for that reason. You can be Joe Schmo or Martha Stewart; no one really cares. But, the men who hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11, 2001 began their trip at the Portland International Jetport, shattering our peace and quiet and that feeling of removal from the hustle and bustle of “away.”
I first learned about the tragedy after I parked my bicycle at my gym that morning. A woman was telling the clerk, “Now they’re crashing planes into the World Trade Center!” We all crowded around the fuzzy image of a small black and white TV in the maintenance office to find out what happened. In shock and seeking the comfort of community, many of us stayed to halfheartedly finish our workout before going home. Quietly some of us discussed people they knew who worked in the higher floors.
My husband and I had gone to Manhattan for the weekend and had just returned Sunday night. Eerily, as our train traveled east, I looked back. The towers were visible. “Look Honey,” I said, “The World Trade Center, remember how my sister was there when they were bombed in 1993?”
Growing up in the sixties and early seventies in New York State, as the planning and building of the World Trade Center was underway, those two towers were part of our curriculum at school and often in the news. We had that and the space program as the big things of the day. They mattered.
That day, more than the Twin Towers were destroyed along with the lives of so many people: the Pentagon, an icon for defense and national security, proved open to attack, and one field in Pennsylvania recalls the courage of those on board United Flight 93. As we all know that flight was intended for Washington D.C. It seems they chose icons of commerce, security and government. The attack targeted our morale as much as it tried to kill people, destroy buildings or damage our ability to keep the country going.
By the time I biked home, the towers had collapsed and we were learning about the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. Working nearby, but not knowing the scope of what was happening, my husband came home when I called him in tears. A frequent flier, he thought they’d targeted those flights because they were fully fueled.
Even before arriving home I tried to reach a pilot friend who flies for American out of Boston. I tried and tried when I got home too. When his wife finally answered the phone cheerfully I knew she didn’t know. As calmly as possible I asked where her husband was. She told me they were outside working all morning. They had had no idea what had happened. She did notice then that their answering machine was full. Of course, he lost friends and co-workers. There were other lessons in degrees of separation: a friend had been on the same commuter flight to Logan as the terrorists, a man we knew lost his son-in-law, an old friend’s retirement from the service was revoked. He still serves. We all have a story, HBO is telling some of those with new and encore programming.
HBO will air special programming marking the 10th anniversary of the attacks:
BEYOND 9/11: PORTRAITS OF RESILIENCE highlights previously untold and transcendent stories of courage, survival and remembrance. The all-new documentary, presented by TIME magazine in association with HBO, debuts SUNDAY, SEPT. 11 at 8:46 a.m. (ET) – ten years to the minute that American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into World Trade Center One.
Other programming will encore:
The documentary IN MEMORIAM: NEW YORK CITY, 9/11/01 provides a panoramic view. Sunday, Sept. 11 at 7:15 a.m. (ET/PT). TELLING NICHOLAS looks at the day though the eyes of a seven-year old whose mother was killed: Sunday, Sept. 11 at 10:30 a.m. (ET/PT) on the HBO Signature channel. NINE INNINGS FROM GROUND ZERO recoding the 2001 World Series between the Yankees and the Diamondbacks a month afterward: Saturday, Sept. 10 at 8:00 a.m. (ET/PT) on HBO.