Recalling A Feeling - September 2001

I remember so well the feeling of angst, the distraction and feeling of dread that I simply could not shake the evening of September 10, 2001. It should have been a time of excitement and exhilaration because I was just getting word that evening that I'd been selected to develop a play with the full support of a major community playhouse and its artistic creative director, but for some reason I found myself trembling, my stomach churning, and I couldn't account for the feelings. It was so prevasive that I made mention of it to family and recorded it in my journal.

The next morning, while sipping my coffee with my husband, we were doing as we did most mornings; watching the morning news when the network host broke in to say a commuter plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. My goodness, I thought immediately, because something in the play I'd just had accepted for development had a pivotal scene that I'd loosely created from events from the first World Trade Center attack. That's not good, I remember thinking, and then ... well then as the tv screen shifted to the scene of the first tower crash, and as we watched still sipping our morning coffee, another plane appeared and -- the rest is the history we have all lived everyday since.

It took a day or two in the midst of all that followed the horrible events of that day - 9/11 - before I remembered that all encompassing sense of dread that have enveloped me the evening before. But, once I remembered it, I have never since forgotten it. I am keenly aware of my feelings as never before, and I've admittedly had knee-jerk reactions when I've thought I was feeling that same sense of foreboding, only to realize that I wasn't. As time had gone on, I'm less afraid of its imminent return, but I will never be less afraid of what I'll do if I ever really feel that feeling again. May I never!

No Thought of Surrender
(Written September 11, 2001)

Anguish spreads blood red
across heart and mind
numb with inability to
comprehend the unrightable
written eternally
on our national psyche.
Never began today with
blue sky and warm
smiles and no thought
of nightmares raining
ash and cinder,
no thought of surrender
of all we once knew
as norm.
Our knees bend with
involuntary motion, while
our souls roil in
anguish,
and blood red images
of all we hold sacred, dear,
safe, secure
spreads across our broken hearts
and minds and the cry rises
in unity:
dear God help us.

©2001 Peggy Eldridge-Love
From YOU BECKON