Common Ground

The fall of 2001 was about new beginnings for me.  Bernie and I had gone our separate ways. I had moved out of the house we had purchased together one year earlier and was settling into life on my own.  Bernie had sold the house and had moved into a condo nearby.  We intentionally lived in neighborhoods within the same school system to make life for Nick as easy as possible.  Our break-up was hardly amicable and we were finally able to discuss what was happening with Nick without being at each other’s throats.  We were equally sharing physical custody, which meant that Nick lived with Bernie half the time.  The space without Nick was an uncomfortable place for me.  The schedule worked out so that Bernie had Nick every Saturday.  I signed up for an accelerated Saturday MBA class at the University of New Haven to give myself something positive to focus on when Nick wasn’t with me.  I was working at Integrated Process Technologies (“IPT”).  IPT was a small facilities management company based in Hartford, that had recently been acquired by Enron. I had just been promoted to a position where I was basically a project manager for the implementation of new contracts.  Enron was providing tuition assistance for my MBA.  Nick was adjusting well to the rhythm of Kindergarten.  I was twenty-five and excited about the future.

September 11^th, was a beautiful, crisp fall day. The sun was shining high in the sky.  The leaves were just starting to turn yellow and red. As I drove into work, I sang “Beautiful Day” along with U2 on the radio, thinking that it really, truly was. I got to work, started up my computer and headed into a meeting with my manager, Brian.  He was visibly upset and said he had heard reports that a small private plane had crashed into one of the twin towers.  He seemed to know right away that we were under attack.  I tried to downplay it, insisting it was an accident.  It wasn’t long until all of the reports starting coming in about a second plane hitting the other tower, the Pentagon, the plane going down in Pennsylvania, and the towers falling.  We kept trying to refresh CNN for the latest news but the websites were freezing from all of the traffic. We had co-workers that had flown out that morning.  No one knew where they were or if they were alright. No one knew whether there would be another assault.  It was the first time I was ever concerned about our close proximity to two major cities. I was an hour away from Nick, and his school was near both the Navy Submarine Base in Groton and the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant.  I feared that they could be targets. I didn’t know whether to stay put or pick him up from school.  There were not a lot of words spoken that day by anyone.  We watched the events unfold in stunned silence.

I stayed at work. Nick stayed at school.   I just wanted to see Nick, to hug him, to tell him it was going to be ok, to convince myself it was it was going to be ok.  It was Bernie’s night to pick Nick up from daycare and to have him sleep-over.  Bernie gave me the green light to stop over after work, and I did.  We sat on the couch and just watched the footage over and over again. I didn’t want to go back to my empty apartment alone that night.  I ended up staying with Bernie.  I never left.  We didn’t tell anyone we were back together for almost six months.  We didn’t want to see our friends roll their eyes at us again, hear the sighs, the warnings, the lectures about how us being a couple was a terrible idea. Almost a year later we were engaged and almost two years later, we got married.

We were lucky in that we didn’t lose anyone we knew in those attacks.  We were scarred by what took place, I don’t know how you could not be. The events of that day reminded us that there are no guarantees in life.  It made us realize what was important; and how all of the things we used to fight about were wholly insignificant.  We began to appreciate how much better we were together than we were apart. 

I don't think any of us will ever forget what happened on 9/11. As a nation, however, it seems we have collectively forgotten the lesson of what happened after the attacks: the importance of unity.  We came together as a country to figure out how to move forward and we took those first steps together. The best way to pay tribute to the individuals who lost their lives on that horrific day and their families who remain among us, is to find common ground, politically, socially, economically.  We are facing some enormous challenges as the United States of America; we can resolve those issues through working together, through compromise, through leaving polarized positions and once again being united.