September 11, 2001

My memories of September 11, 2001, how I experienced the unfolding events of that day, differ, I suppose, from other people's experiences.

I don't usually watch television in the morning. So I didn't learn of the terrorist attacks when they occurred, in real time.

As usual that morning, I went to the fitness room to work out. It was after 9:30 am. I was working out on the stair climber. Those were the days when the fitness room had a stair climber. The door to the fitness room -- and I'm talking about the old fitness room, the one that preceded the ultra-modern fitness room installed in 2003 -- was made of glass. One of the tenants walked by and glared at me. It was a look that I registered as odd. I thought, "Why is he looking at me like that? What did I do." I suppose, in retrospect, he was wondering why I wasn't following events on TV. That was Michael Epstein, by the way. He used to live in apartment 108.

I finished my workout, came back to my apartment and took a shower. I turned on the radio. NPR was reporting on a fire at the Pentagon. I thought: "A fire at the Pentagon! Who the hell cares about a fire at the Pentagon?" And so I turned the radio off.

I left my building to spend the afternoon at the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library. People were walking up Connecticut Avenue in droves as I walked south to the library. I assumed there was a problem with the Metro.

Yanni's Deli on Connecticut Avenue was closed. I didn't think anything of that.

When I got to the library there was a sign on the door: "Library closed due to emergency conditions."

I walked back up Connecticut Avenue to the Giant Supermarket. I gathered up a few items and took my place in the check-out line. Adam Skillings was the checkout clerk. He was talking to a customer, saying: "I'm surprised it hasn't happened before now." The customer asked if the store would be open till its normal closing hour of 9:00 PM. Adam Skillings said he didn't know; that he hadn't heard anything yet.

So there were all these clues in the environment that something had happened, but I failed to put things together. It was sort of like the opposite of paranoia. In paranoia, the individual takes chance trivial events and creates a paranoid narrative that ties all the facts together. In this instance, I was failing to put facts together into a coherent narrative or even suspicion.

When I got home at about 12:30 I turned on the television. I remember the late David Bloom on NBC was reporting, recounting all the events of the morning. I couldn't believe what I was seeing! I still remember David Bloom using the word "disgusting" to describe the attacks. The word stuck out in my mind. You rarely hear reporters use a word like that in reporting events.