Five Years Ago

I was in a hurry packing up my laptop when I got a call from my partner to turn on the television. I was late, which was mostly a figurative notion at the time since we had been freelancing for months with virtually no fixed schedule, and I hadn't even bothered to check the news online.

When I hit the power button, the news was clearly unavoidable. The second plane had just crashed and they were repeating over and over how it wasn't an accident. Downtown Chicago was made off limits and suddenly being late didn't seem like such a terrible idea anyway. By the time the first tower collapsed, we had made plans to meet in a diner and get some work done there.

To this day, I can't remember the diner's name. I could probably find it just by walking down the street though. We drank coffee and worked through some bugs and design problems while watching reports which included such factoids as the Sears Tower being a potential target (we know now it wasn't).

Oddly, the only other time I can recall that we worked out of that diner was when the sniper on the east coast was still in the headlines. They make a good cup of coffee but apparently I'm drawn to that place based on tragedy.

Now I work a steady job and spend most of my day out in the suburbs, where my employer is headquartered. I'm still an ardent city dweller, but the notion that downtown might get removed from my daily life isn't really an issue anymore. It's been five years, but I still remember many details from the day. It's what psychologists would refer to as a "flashbulb memory", something which has enough impact that the brain makes the extra effort to record every detail. It's been five years and yet the day still hangs on ... and as I hear the radio about another bombing in Baghdad it hangs on a little longer. Bush has publically admitted, several times, that Iraq was not connected to this day ... and I'm sure he'll pair the two together in speeches all this week.

I didn't really wake up this morning planning to post this instead of a standard blog crawl - but when I saw those Mario plushies off of a news feed, it didn't seem real fitting. So you get this instead.