Recall: Blue Sky
On September 11, 2001, I got out of the Farragut West Metro station here in Washington and started walking north toward Dupont Circle. Like that day we've seen on TV so many times, the sky here was snapdragon blue and cloudless. There was a light breeze.
I ducked into a record store because the date was already important to me: I picked up Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft," which dropped that day. I was at the store early, but the manager was checking in new disks and let me in. When I was finished, I continued to my office job, on the tenth floor of a relatively big building above the circle. It was not yet 8:30 am.
I listened to the record, smiling at its gentle pace and simple melodies. Bob's last record, the Grammy-winning "Time Out of Mind," was fulll of tortured souls and dreams darkened by reality. This record had tunes of love and devotion, and grizzled rockers offering no apologies.
One song, "High Water (For Charley Patton)," was a slow-building ominous tune about definite endings and absolute edicts. It was eerily prescient.
I listened to the words and thought that Bob was creating a whole different world with the song, a hazardous, mythical, angry, sad world, like the troubled land of "Desolation Row." As a flood once and for all wipes away this stained universe, final acts of desperation and careless impulses consume everyone: "Judge says to the High Sheriff/ I want them dead or alive/ Either one, I don't care/Highwater everywhere." and "Highwater rising/ six inches above my head/ Coffins droppin' in the street like balloons made out of lead."
Then the first airplane his the World Trade Center. Staff members all collected in the conference room to watch the morning broadcast of a long shot of the twin towers, smoke billowing from one as we all listened to Katie and Matt pondering the terrible accident, and wondered how a plane hadn't accidentally bumped into the tall buildings earlier.
I went back to my desk and listened to music for another minute. Then I was heading through the conference room toward the other side of the office when I stopped to rubberneck for a minute. The second plane hit right as I was standing there, and I just sat down in a chair. Everybody knows what happened next.
Much later, I was trying to get home to Virginia, and we had to walk a pretty good distance because so much of our public transportation is mingled with startlingly important things. Every morning and every afternoon, my wife and I transferred from bus to train or train to bus at the Pentagon, which had been hit by an airplane. On the train as we made our way out of the city, we were stopped one station short of the Pentagon, and made to offload at Arlington Cemetery.
We walked along the George Washington Parkway, trying to figure how to get to our home, which was only a half-mile away directly through the locked down cemetery and the adjacent Fort Myer, also under lockdown. Instead, we wandered over to Rosslyn, creeped out by the tall buildings and industrial smell of burning Pentagon, which lingered around our South Arlington home for days.
I remember the sky was strangely still very blue, and totally cloudless, and no matter how long you stared, there was never an airplane.
On September 11, 2001, I got out of the Farragut West Metro station here in Washington and started walking north toward Dupont Circle. Like that day we've seen on TV so many times, the sky here was snapdragon blue and cloudless. There was a light breeze.
I ducked into a record store because the date was already important to me: I picked up Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft," which dropped that day. I was at the store early, but the manager was checking in new disks and let me in. When I was finished, I continued to my office job, on the tenth floor of a relatively big building above the circle. It was not yet 8:30 am.
I listened to the record, smiling at its gentle pace and simple melodies. Bob's last record, the Grammy-winning "Time Out of Mind," was fulll of tortured souls and dreams darkened by reality. This record had tunes of love and devotion, and grizzled rockers offering no apologies.
One song, "High Water (For Charley Patton)," was a slow-building ominous tune about definite endings and absolute edicts. It was eerily prescient.
I listened to the words and thought that Bob was creating a whole different world with the song, a hazardous, mythical, angry, sad world, like the troubled land of "Desolation Row." As a flood once and for all wipes away this stained universe, final acts of desperation and careless impulses consume everyone: "Judge says to the High Sheriff/ I want them dead or alive/ Either one, I don't care/Highwater everywhere." and "Highwater rising/ six inches above my head/ Coffins droppin' in the street like balloons made out of lead."
Then the first airplane his the World Trade Center. Staff members all collected in the conference room to watch the morning broadcast of a long shot of the twin towers, smoke billowing from one as we all listened to Katie and Matt pondering the terrible accident, and wondered how a plane hadn't accidentally bumped into the tall buildings earlier.
I went back to my desk and listened to music for another minute. Then I was heading through the conference room toward the other side of the office when I stopped to rubberneck for a minute. The second plane hit right as I was standing there, and I just sat down in a chair. Everybody knows what happened next.
Much later, I was trying to get home to Virginia, and we had to walk a pretty good distance because so much of our public transportation is mingled with startlingly important things. Every morning and every afternoon, my wife and I transferred from bus to train or train to bus at the Pentagon, which had been hit by an airplane. On the train as we made our way out of the city, we were stopped one station short of the Pentagon, and made to offload at Arlington Cemetery.
We walked along the George Washington Parkway, trying to figure how to get to our home, which was only a half-mile away directly through the locked down cemetery and the adjacent Fort Myer, also under lockdown. Instead, we wandered over to Rosslyn, creeped out by the tall buildings and industrial smell of burning Pentagon, which lingered around our South Arlington home for days.
I remember the sky was strangely still very blue, and totally cloudless, and no matter how long you stared, there was never an airplane.
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