September 11, 2007

• Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning….

  …On That September Day???

  It’s hard to believe that six years have passed since that beautiful, yet tragic day happened. I say beautiful because the weather was quite lovely as I recall.

  Here’s my story of where I was that day…

  My family and I were finally settled in here in Tawas. I was trying like crazy, though in vain, to find a job here. Anyways, my old Ford Contour was once again, needing front brakes. You could pretty much time it out to exactly every five thousand miles the breaks were going to need to be replaced. I loved that car, when it wasn’t in the shop, which was like, hardly ever. But I digress…My uncle Doug had said that if I brought the car down to Ypsilanti he would do the break job for me, just because. So that Tuesday morning, my mom and I were planning to leave around 11 to head down for a couple of days. I woke up around nine and began to get ready. I turned on the tv for some noise, and noticed that there was a live shot from NY showing smoke coming out from the side of one of the twin towers, and they were saying a plane had crashed. They made it sound as if it was a smallish plane at the time. I remember watching that and saying to myself, “Wow, that’s going to be hard for them to get up there and fix back!” After a little while, I saw CNN anchorman Aaron Brown. He was sitting on a balcony I guess, and the towers were behind him. As he was talking about how terrorists were possibly involved, I saw the other plane in the background come around and smash into the other tower. All I could say was “Oh my gosh!!!”  I finally tore myself away from the tv to go and find my mother and tell her that she needed to come to the tv, because “our country is being attacked!!!”

  We sat there and watched in horror as the story developed, as word and pictures came in from Washington at the Pentagon, and as word came in about a crash in Pennsylvania. 

  All was so calm and quiet up here, it was so hard to imagine that pandemonium had erupted in this our fair land.

  After a while my mom phoned my grandfather, and asked him if he thought it would be safe for us to make the trip, to which he replied, “Now think about it, out of all the people in the world, do you really think that the terrorists are going to single out your car???” To which my mother replied, “I guess you’re right”. So off we went, though several hours after we had planned. Along the way we saw a couple of gas stations had raised their prices to almost $5.00 a gallon!!!  We did eventually make it, and we all sat gathered around the tv in my grandparent’s living room.

  You may recall that all aircraft travel was banned for several days after that, and I remember that first evening being outside, and noticing how unusually quiet it was outside, because we were only fifteen miles from Detroit Metro Airport, so you always heard planes in the air.

  We stayed for several days there. I did get the car fixed, and somehow life went on for us.

  If you ask me, that was the day that not only did America, in essence lose it’s innocence, but I also believe that in many ways that day set off the countdown clock to the Lord’s return. I say that because it seems as if since that day sooo many different things have come to pass that the Bible said would before Jesus came back.

  So to that I say, if you are not ready to meet God face to face, then you ought to be getting ready, because mark my words, the day is coming, when we all will see him, face to face.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  You may recall from my vacation pictures the pictures I took of the memorial to the 9/11 victims of Monmouth County, New Jersey. I went to see it with my cousin Laura when we went to the Ocean. I thought it would be fitting to include them here one more time. The platform has the names engraved off all from Monmouth County who died that day, and the eagle is clutching in his talons a piece of steel from one of the towers.

  

  In the now famous words of country crooner Alan Jackson, I once again ask…

  “Where were you when the world stopped turning, on that September day???”

  Love Always,
  -Richard.
  

  • 11:54 pm
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