QotD: Reflecting on September 11th

What are your personal memories of September 11th?

I flew home on September 10. Home being Montgomery, the home I never wanted, the one I always rejected. I was born there, and grew up most of my life there, but it always felt like an abusive parent. My mom had called on the 9th: your grandmother is dying. If you want to see her again, you need to come now.

My mom wouldn't let my grandmother languish at a hospital. Mom moved her into her bedroom, and set up Hospice care to come by as the cancer slowly took my grandmother. I flew home on the 10th. I remember being in the BART station by myself, contemplative, waiting on a train to take me to Oakland. When I got to my mother's house that evening, I wasn't sure my grandmother knew who I was. We had always been extremely close.

September 11 began for me, as it did for so many people, with a phone call. This one came in the middle of the night, maybe one a.m. I had tickets to see Modest Mouse at the Warfield on the 10th, but since I flew home I gave my ticket to my friend Jeff, and he went with Harper. It was Jeff calling: After working a 12 hour shift and going straight to the show, Harper had passed out in the crowd at the Warfield. She was fine. She was home. It was all very weird. I had trouble going back to sleep; I was worried. I could hear my grandmother's labored breathing in the room next to me.

We woke up that morning and went to work on my grandmother. We had to straighten her out, she had curled up in the night and needed to be straightened. It took all three of us to do this--myself, my mother and Victorine--and she howled as moved her. I wasn't sure if she was cognizant of what was happening.

And then my mom and Victorine needed to get her uncompacted. Thankfully, they sent me out of the room for this. I went into thr front room of my mother's little house on Carter Hill Drive. It was a little after  eight  o' clock, Central time.  I didn't know what to do with myself, standing there, listening to my grandmother scream in pain from the back bedroom.  And then, the phone rang.