Where Were You?

I was still at the storage in Santee. My stepmom, Marlise had passed away the year before, July 2000, and the storage was being sold. I still managed it for the estate and the trustees were not talking to me. I began to manage the storage in 1979 for my Dad. My children finished growing up there. My dad used to stop by to talk almost every day. In 1983 my marriage broke up and in 1985 my father passed away. Marlise and I became close friends. She would come by to talk almost every day and we would go to lunch. When I got Hailey we took her with us out to lunch. Fun times.

The house was old and had been there before the storage was built, E.R. and I lived in the house when our oldest, David, was a baby and we took in Jeff when we lived there. Jeff was our nephew. Later we moved to our own house and we adopted Jeff.

Marlise had open heart surgery in 1998. I drove her to her appointments and then to the hospital. We took Hailey along on the doctor appointments. Hailey was almost four then. Marlise was supposed to get well but they found cancer in her airway...just a small spot. For some reason they decided against chemo. They decided on radiation and a stint. Maybe because she was still recovering from the heart surgery. I put Hailey in day care near here so I could drive Marlise to her appointments. The next two years were total stress. Then Marlise died and my sister turned against me. She was one of the trustees and the other trustee also was a total bitch to me. The first thing they did was cut off my ability to pay bills for the storage and then they both went on vacation. URF! Looking back I don't know how I kept it together. Hailey had gone to day care and then to the kindergarten at Creative Child for over two years. It was time to take her out. E.R. was living up here in Eucalyptus Hills so I but Hailey into first grade at the small school here. It meant a trip up here every morning for us both. Hailey would have breakfast at E.R.'s and then he would drive her down the road to the school. I went back to the storage and coped the best I could.

On the morning of September 11th I got Hailey ready and we were ready to go out the door. I went to shut off the TV when I saw the first tower burning and they said a plane had hit it. I thought it was a terrible accident. Then another plane flew into the second tower. Maybe it was all the stress I had been living with, I felt numb. My mind couldn't process something so dreadful. We had to leave to get Hailey to school. The first thing we did at E.R.s was look at the TV! I thought about my parents hearing about Pearl Harbor on the radio. My young life was filled with war news. I was a little girl when the war was over but people talked about it for years.

As everyone else did, I kept the TV on and saw the people running and the towers falling. Nothing will ever be the same and then again most everything is the same. This country is big and the loss of the two towers is a tragedy that we should never forget. We have been at war with Muslims ever since too and now the US is broke. The US has been broke before. We have been attacked before. We survived. If anything is learned by the loss of the towers and so many lives, and the wars that followed, terrorism doesn't work. It only makes people want to fight back.