This is a weird and hard day in our house, as I’m sure it is for many of you.

Jill and I hadn’t met yet, but both of us lived in the DC area at the time.

Jill worked for the Redskins, and one of the game-day staff who worked for her, Cecelia Richard, worked full-time at the Pentagon.

Jill saw Cecelia’s sister on tv that morning, crying that she couldn’t find Cecelia. It took Jill hours to track down the other staff she had who also worked at the Pentagon, including some of the people to whom she was the closest. Then it took a few days for the NFL to decide that it was cancelling all games that first weekend, so she had to continue trying to get ready for the game.

I was on a speaking tour, training school district technology coordinators on compliance with the (mostly appropriately resented) Children’s Internet Protection Act.

On Monday, I’d been in Sacramento. Tuesday I was in Riverside, California. I was scheduled to be in Massachusetts on Thursday and New Hampshire on Friday. And Michigan on Tuesday of the next week. Ha.

I’ll never forget the surrealness of that day. I woke up before 5:30 am pacific time, ordered room service, turned on CNN.

At first, I didn’t get it. The second tower hadn’t been hit yet, and it seemed like an awful thing, but not one that was going to affect my life. It seemed like an extra bad news event.

I got online to confirm my car reservation at Logan airport for Wednesday. That’s how much I didn’t understand at first. I saw Dave online; he was already up and already knew, and was already freaking out because Liz lived in New York City at the time. Liz usually took the train to work, and should have been under the WTC, but for whatever incredibly lucky reason, she wasn’t, and she was ok.

Somewhere in there, the second tower was hit, and then everything started spinning out of control. And I felt my mind and heart begin to go into “deal later, NOT NOW” mode. I walked downstairs to the front desk to extend my reservation by one night.

While there, I ran into the California state school technology coordinator, who had travelled with me from Sacramento to Riverside. He wanted to make sure I was ready to go do the workshop that day.

Really.

I got dressed and did it.

Really.

As I got in the zone, I was able to shut out my fear and shock and do the first half of the workshop.

But when we broke for lunch, we turned on CNN. I spent the rest of lunch trying to reach my sister, who lived and worked in Manhattan, my cousin, who worked for OMB a block from the White House, and other friends.

I whipped through the second “half” of the workshop in approximately half an hour. Then I told all the SoCal school district people to go home to their families, because they could.

They didn’t, not right away. They had questions about my presentation and their compliance. Answering them, getting up in my brain, was oddly comforting.

When it was finally over, I went back to the hotel.

I called one of my co-workers who had lived in Riverside, found out that everyone at work was shaken up, but ok, and got a restaurant recommendation. I thought I wanted to be around people.

Aleck directed me to a liberal bar & grill, and I sat at the bar for dinner. But when other diners started talking about the days events, and debating the political responsibility, I suddenly found that I couldn’t be around them. I couldn’t listen at all.

Honestly, I was shocked.

For people outside of New York and DC, and maybe Pennsylvania, it was a terrible, awful thing. But it happened somewhere else, to other people. (It was weeks, maybe months, before I could have that conversation. Poor Reno worried that my brain had been kidnapped by aliens, or worse, that maybe I was becoming conservative.)

I knew my family was ok, and my closest friends. But I didn’t know yet whether my city was ok, or my acquaintences. What was going to happen to my commute? My grocery store? The people I nodded hello to on my errands?

I couldn’t cope with strangers, and spent the rest of the evening tracking down someone, please, someone that I know in Southern Cal.

Eventually, I found the perfect person: Sarah. Her older sister was my childhood best friend, but we hadn’t seen each other in 5 or 6 years. I talked her mother’s husband, whom I’d never met, into giving me Sarah’s phone number. We had dinner, she gave me a hug, I got reconnected, just enough, to life being good.

Every morning that week, I woke up thinking I was going to fly home tomorrow. On Friday, I got as far as being on the freeway, driving to LAX.

When the United Airlines representative picked up my call to confirm my flight that morning, the first thing she said to me after pulling up my flight information was, “Please don’t cry.”

I still don’t know how I avoided wrecking the car.

All the emotions I’d been surpressing since Tuesday broke through as I sobbed to the poor woman, “I just want to go home!”

My voice still cracks when I say that phrase, even on a regular day. Right now, I’m crying as I remember it.

I was on the freeway, in Anaheim, as it turned out. I pulled off into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant, and just sobbed.

When I finally ran out of tears, the gas station across the street caught my eye in the rear view mirror, and in that moment, I moved into the anger and in action stage of grief.

I was going to fucking drive home and I was leaving as soon as I could gas up the car. Hertz could have it back at BWI. (BTW, there were no damn maps. The people who drove home on Tuesday bought them all. I did the entire drive on an 8.5×11 inch map of the entire United States.)
All that is the sad and hard part of September 11, for me.

Then it gets complicated.

You see, I was asked to detour up to Denver, to pick up a friend of a friend who was also stuck. I’d met Christa, briefly, but the main thing I knew about her was that she usually didn’t get along with the women who were dating the woman I was dating.

Of course I declined.

Then my credit card was rejected because the travel tripped AmEx’s fraud triggers. That happened just the other side of the Mojave Desert. And I was feeling how LOOOOONG and LONELY this drive was going to be for me.

Approximately 2 seconds after I reached cell phone range near Flagstaff, Christa called me herself. I heard in her voice that she needed to get home, just like I did. And I thought, “Why am I being such an asshole?” After some discussion of the logistics, and me slowly and stubbornly getting that not going would just be wrong, I agreed to detour 6 hours out of my way and pick her up the next day.

(Geographical and humorous aside: I took the left at Albuquerque!)

Through a complex series of events over the next six months or so, Christa became roommates with Jill, and Jill finally quit perceiving me as, “That straight girl in the sneakers.”

And that changed everything. Everything about my life.

If I hadn’t been stuck, and I hadn’t said yes to the most unreasonable request anyone has ever made of me, if one of the worst national tragedies our country has experienced hadn’t taken place, my life would look completely different. Maaaaybe Jill and I would have met, but we both think we probably wouldn’t have spoken beyond a brief, “hey, nice to meetcha,” in the other contexts we can imagine having met.

And that is what makes this day weird, so weird, for me.