Mary Beth Eastman can't remember where she was when the planes struck the World Trade Center; she was unconscious. Sometimes strange things happen, and sometimes strange things happen for a reason.
Posted on June 11, 2003 10:43 PMBy Mary Beth Eastman
210 west Writer [send email]
sept. 11, 2001
7:57 a.m.
I was going to be late to work. Again. No time for breakfast, just a can of Coke and a quick cigarette on the drive over to Belmont Country Club.
I worked there as a receptionist in the daytime and a waitress at night, spending 14 hours a day at the beck and call of the rich. It wasn't much, and they made me take my nose stud out, but it was a job.
8:02 a.m.
Yanked my timecard out of its slot and punched it. Two minutes late meant fifteen minutes' docked pay. I hustled through the back hallways and the long narrow kitchen and crossed the shimmering lobby.
Settled into my wee little desk, off to the side of the Big Boss's desk. Big Boss was an unbelievable WASP, the kind you thought died out decades ago. They don't die, they go into hiding with the rest of their kind.
8:08 a.m.
I begin alphabetizing the chits from last week's dinner patrons.
8:43 a.m.
I cross my legs. My right ankle slams into the leg of the mini-desk I sit at. It hurts. I bend down to look at it. Bending down makes me dizzy. I think I'm going to throw up.
I try to walk out of the office to the women's room off the lobby.
8:46 a.m.
In New York, a plane flies into the World Trade Center.
In Ohio, I lose consciousness and black out in the wide lobby of the country club.
8:47 a.m.
I come to. Chef Jim, in his whites, is leaning over me with a table cloth. The sunlight bounces off the parquet floors. The little old ladies who answer the telephones hustle out into the lobby, fretting like mother hens. One calls 911.
In New York, the horror has begun.
8: 59 a.m.
The ambulance drives into the circular drive of the club. My mother is there, too, in her minivan. She looks horrified. I am carted out, supine, and loaded into the ambulance.
9:03 a.m.
In New York, the second plane hits.
In Ohio, I crack my eyes open. Sunlight is pouring through the back window of the ambulance. Two of the EMS technicians are leaning over me. It's a beautiful morning.
9:26 a.m.
I wake up again. I am wired up, covered with electrodes and hooked into an IV. I am in a tiny room, and I have to pee. The machine next to me is beeping.
The television is on in the lounge; while I'm dragging my IV rigging into the tiny bathroom, my mother is seeing the first footage of images we'll all soon come to know by heart.
As she stands, watching the impossible happen, she tells the nurse, "We're at war." The nurse replies, "You think so?"
9:30 a.m.
In Washington, a plane crashes into the Pentagon.
In Ohio, I am drinking a hospital-issue smoothie, to rebalance my electrolytes. A nurse scolds me for not eating breakfast. I am admonished. I am repentant. I dutifully eat the banana she hands me.
10:06 a.m.
In Pennsylvania, the last plane crashes.
In Ohio, I'm itching to go home. The machine next to me has stopped its beeping. It's broken. But I am still alive.
My mother explains to me what little she could glean from the news. Denial strikes, and hard. She must be mistaken, she must be wrong, these things could never happen. It's the Pentagon, for Chrissakes.
She's not wrong, though. This sinks in on the drive home.
11:00 a.m.
In New York, panic has overtaken the city. In Pennsylvania, word of the crash is getting around. And in Washington, high-stakes diplomacy is underway.
In Ohio, my mother drives me home. I absently hold my arm, the one that held the needle of the IV. I stare at all the other drivers -- how dare they be on the road! How dare they be driving, shopping, pumping gas! I wonder what the truth is; what, dear God, has happened out there? What has happened?
***
Slowly, dazedly, we made it home. Phone calls are placed; almost all family members are found, accounted for, consoled.
I turn the television on, and see, for the first time, what is unfolding. Denial has flown the coop.
The shock sets in, and the tears follow.
***
I have never been more grateful for a hospital visit or a wage-slave job as I was that day. The only place I felt safe, the only place I could stand to be, was at home with my baby brother, my mother, my father, my sisters, and my dog, watching the news and discovering what that praying thing is all about. Thanks to the peculiar circumstances of that Tuesday morning, that's precisely what I was able to do.
***
sept. 11, 2003
Two years have flown by, and I now live 45 minutes from the Pentagon. The shock has worn off. The tears have dried up. The fear, the paranoia, and the anxiety have faded away.
But these things are still with me, waiting to be remembered. Sometimes, they are remembered, and the memories themselves are frightening and shocking. Sometimes, 9/11 becomes screamingly, painfully horrific again.
And sometimes it's just a catchphrase, an excuse, a bumper sticker.
But in the moments when it's so frighteningly real, so personal and painful and terrifying, I feel myself changing again, just a little bit. Growing up a little bit, reaching out a little bit.
And thanking Whoever's Up There for saving me this time. For knocking me unconscious in Ohio, where I was safe. And for waking me, at the same time, to something larger than my own life.
To me, 9/11 is not about vengeance. It's not about 'War on Terror.' It's not even about America or patriotism. It's a terrible reminder of mortality, fate, and chance. It's a visceral urge to nest, to draw my family around me. And it's a tiny glimpse of hope, too -- hope that we'll all remember the comfort we gained from each other, and hope that we can learn to change. It's the hope we found in the people around us.
We may be the next "Me Generation," but all of us have that hope in us. Let's not forget it.