Remembrance

Over the past week, I've heard various stories from people; their memories of 9/11.

Where they were, whom they were with, what they were doing. What they were thinking.

So I thought of my story. Here it is:

I was living in Pueblo at the time, but on this day five years ago I was in Arvada staying at Mom's house since I had gone to the Broncos' Monday Night Football the night before. Out of nowhere, she burst into the guest room where I was sleeping, shouting "We're being attacked!" Wha? My brother had called her from Minnesota, an hour ahead, and told her, plainly, "Turn on the TV." I think it was about 8 a.m. MDT. I followed her into the living room and we didn't even speak. My dad appeared, he didn't say a word. We sat in silence, watching what so many of us can replay vividly in our minds. And I had to go to work. In Pueblo. I think it was about 11 a.m. or noon when I was driving down Interstate 25, and I saw something that will never be erased from memory. A single man standing on the bridge of Downing or Washington (this is all before the T-REX project) was waving an American flag. It was big, he was small, and that flag flapped to the left and the right, and he just stood there, making his statement. I drove down the highway, listening to a continuous feed of news from the radio, then went straight to the newsroom in Pueblo. Sympathetic faces stared back at me, and nobody said a word to each other. The first thing I wanted to find out was if the high school soccer games in the county had been cancelled. "Nope," my editor said. Shoot. I had to cover a boy's game and I didn't really want to. Begrudgingly, I arrived at the Roncalli Middle School soccer field, where it was East and Centennial high schools getting ready to take the pitch, both teams unbeaten. In the press box, I sat with the scoreboard operator and an officer working security. We tuned the radio to the news. The soccer game was flat, boring, inconsequential. The first thing I asked the boys after the game was, "Do you even want to be out here?" The overwhelming sentiment was no. They wanted to be at home, with family, with friends. Not out doing this. The next day, the school district said it should have postponed games, which is what most districts in Colorado did, not to mention professional sports leagues. It was the right thing to do. I wrote my soccer story for the next day's paper, all the while catching snippets of news from TVs and wire stories. On that day, I couldn't get enough coverage. It was all to satisfy the question that was poking at me all day. The burning question was "Why?"

"Why did this happen?"