Tragedy and the Gift

It was a regular Tuesday, and by regular I mean I was late to work. As usual. I had woken up, looked at the clock with alarming clarity (oh the puns!), and headed out the door.

Barrelling up the backroads as usual, I turned on the radio. Back then I could stomach Bob and Tom, but not that day.

I went channel surfing and heard the following:

"...flown into the world trade center. We can only deduce that this is an attack on our country."

To which I replied "Haha, yeah, whatever." But continued to listen.

"The North tower has been hit," he said. "A group of terrorists have hijacked planes, how many we don't know, and...now I'm getting reports of more planes that have veered off course. Ladies and gentlemen, I can't believe what I am telling you right now."

And gooseflesh ran rampant across me.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Working at a bank--let me rephrase that, a local community bank--we had no access to televisions. The flat screens you see in the big financial institutions are paid from your overdraft and check charges. For the small timers, all I had was second hand reports and CNN.com being down continuously.

Throughout the day I got the news in chunks. A second plane had hit the other tower just as I arrived at work. The Pentagon had been attacked. The rumors were flying. The towers were falling. Some brave passengers had overtaken United 93.

Pages of video and/or images cropped up all over the place. With the BBC and CNN getting hammered like nothing seen before, you had to scrimp and gather news on bulletin boards, search engines, and the occasional blog--which hadn't taken off by then and was merely in its 'growing' stage.

It was crazy and weird and hellish and scary and I hope that my children will never see such horrors happen within our borders in our lifetimes.

This doesn't mean they should be stripped of all of their liberties to do so. But that's another blog post.

However, this story does not quite end with the towers falling and me anxiously watching and listening and annotating the news. It ends with a gift. One I wouldn't find for another six weeks or so.

As the tragedy gripped the nation, as the politicians heralded our response as both patriotic and moving, as everything seemed to get brighter around us, the world began making love again.

If you're cringing, it's okay. It's cheesy, but it's the truth.

And sometime around that fateful, horrible day, my beautiful daughter was conceived. Nine months later, June 8th 2002, my precious baby was delivered to me after her amazing mother spent hours upon endless hours in labor.

While I didn't realize it at the time, years later I put together the timeline and realized that while me and Ericka didn't plan for my awesome Annie, in some way the tragedy and subsequent hope of that day brought me my daughter.

And while those lives lost can never be restored, while those soldiers can never die in vain, the world turns on as a mix of terror and hopelessness fills the airwaves. I don't know what people get out of watching old, scary news reports of that day. But I for one am tuning out.

I saw the movies, the documentaries, the Special Reports. But those are not what I want to see today. I'd rather get a long hug from my child, and remember that not all tragedies are so horrible and fruitless in retrospect.

When the revenant came down
We couldn't imagine what it was