It was a gorgeous day. The whole week leading up to 9-11 had been lovely, a mild early September. I’d been in Chestertown, Maryland a few days before with my sister; she had had an interview at Washington College, and I drove her.<\/p>\n\n\n
![\"Myself.](\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/early-september-2001-225x300.jpg\")
I remember driving to KoP from my house in western Chester County (Amish country) and listening to an audio book of Ian Fleming’s “The Living Daylights.” I got to KoP sometime between 7:30 and 8 o’clock to meet the truck and the other managers. The truck arrived, we began unloading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At some point, Tim, the district manager, learned from a tobacco shop at the entrance that a plane had struck one of the towers. The tobacco shop had a television, and we took a break and watched a little bit of the news coverage. But we were also on deadline — the store needed to be ready to open in two days — and we went back to loading in the store.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then the second plane hit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the managers, Rafael, freaked out and then peaced out. The rest of us carried on, a bit glum, especially once we learned the towers had fallen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tim asked me at one point if there were some significance to the date. Did the attackers choose this date to commemorate something? I said I didn’t think so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We worked until mall security threw us out, about 11 o’clock. KOP didn’t even open that day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first Doctor Who<\/i> DVDs were to go on sale that day — The Five Doctors<\/i> and Spearhead from Space<\/i>. I had intended to walk down to Suncoast at the other end of the mall at some point and buy both, then watch one or the other after I got home late in the evening. (I had planned to stay until 7 or 8 o’clock or so.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I remember driving home from KOP and how quiet everything was. I put on CBS when I got home and sat with that for a few hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My best friend’s dad worked in the Pentagon. His office was where that plane struck. Thankfully, Larry wasn’t there that morning, as he was in a meeting at the Navy Annex. I talked with Jason on AOL Instant Messenger that evening, and he wanted to know if I saw the smoke plumes from Pennsylvania. No, I told him, I did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Toy Story” didn’t get written. Tim asked me to come back the next day, and me being me I said I would. The second day was tense, not because of the towers but because there was a deadline to get the store opened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I saw an airplane, a big military cargo jet, fly over KoP while I was waiting for others to arrive. No one believed me, but I know what I saw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dave, our regional vice president, had been in the air, on his way to Cleveland, when the planes struck the tower. Grounded there, several district managers did a chain relay to drive him back to the Philadelphia area, and I ended up having lunch with Dave on the 12th after he got back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s just a well “Toy Story” didn’t get written. There wasn’t a story, just a visual image that I wanted to put into words. Don’t give up on your ideas; it might not be the time, and it might work somewhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I think about 9-11, I think more of my disgust and dismay at the knee-jerk patriotism that followed in the ensuing months. For example, the EB Games warehouse would affix American flag stickers to product, and I side-eyed this because it felt so over-the-top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Plus, there was an unavoidable religious attitude that nearly drove me back into the atheist closet, and in some ways sort of did; I wasn’t quite<\/i> as public about it as I had been before, but it also make me less jerk-ish. I didn’t go through a militant phase, but I wasn’t always tolerant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And, of course, the military adventurism of the Bush regime radicalized me, but that was a year or two down the road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s my 9-11 story. It’s not very interesting, but if I close my eyes I can put myself back into that EBX on a lovely day in early September when it seemed like everything was going to be perfect… until it wasn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
The paragraphs that follow were written on September 14th, three days after the anniversary, on TrekBBS<\/a>. More about how I felt about the anniversary now than the events I experienced then, I thought they were worthy and interesting enough to append here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This 9-11 anniversary has been an odd one for me in that I’ve taken an interest in the day that I never really had before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn’t watch any of it live — I was working that day, unloading a truck to open a new EB Games store at King of Prussia Mall — and after I got home I watched some news coverage (CBS, I think), and talked with my best friend in the evening, as his father worked in Pentagon. (His office was located in the area where the plane hit. Larry was at a meeting off-campus that morning.) I remember my friend asking me if I could see the smoke plumes in Pennsylvania, and I said I hadn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was in New York three weeks later, but it was a soggy, sullen day. I remember looking in the direction of where the towers had stood, but there was nothing to see in the rain and the muck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then it kinda went out of my mind. It was a less an event than a catalyst for a number of other things I didn’t like, like the Bush junta’s military adventurism, a knee-jerk and sometimes absurdist patriotism, and a deeply uncomfortable religiousity. (I hate how “God Bless America,” both as a phrase and as a song, has become so ingrained in our culture.) The things that flowed<\/em> from 9-11 loomed so much larger in my consciousness than the event itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is not to say that I was walled off from it. I don’t know how many times I’ve read Tom Junod’s “The Falling Man<\/a>,” and\u00a0Tim Alberta’s piece on Glenn Vogt<\/a>, the manager of Windows on the World, who was off-site that morning, has stayed with me for years. A coworker’s husband, a firefighter, has done an encumbered walk for at least a decade, if not more, in honor of the FDNY fallen. I wasn’t unaware of the human toll of that day. Hell, for years I’ve felt Peter Jennings was as much a victim of 9-11 as anyone on the planes or in the towers, because he took up smoking again that day to deal with the stress, and the resulting lung cancer killed him. I have even, in absolute sincerity, assigned Sandra Day O’Connor some measure of responsibility, as she helped install Bush as president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This year, though, I went delving. (I am taking this word back, AI! You shall not claim it!) I watched videos. I looked at photographs. I read testimony and a chat transcript from a group of twelve who bailed out of the North Tower because there was nothing else they could do. I even listened to some of recorded phone calls. I was aware peripherally of some of this — I think<\/em> I knew about the Waving Woman, who stood in the gash on the 94th Floor and waved for an hour and half until the North Tower fell, and I knew about the commuter lots with the cars of the workers who never left the buildings, and I knew that firefighters were able to get to the impact zone in the South Tower before it collapsed — but I had never really sat with all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This year I let my guard down. I let myself sit with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My thoughts went to strange and dark and profoundly sad places. Maybe it’s my empathy, maybe it’s my writer-brain, maybe I looked at too much, but it left me a little shaken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This has been a weird one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Twenty-five years ago this morning, Islamic terrorists hijacked four planes, crashing two into the World Trade Center towers in New York and a third into the Pentagon. The idea of that being twenty-five years ago is strange. In many ways, it doesn’t feel that long ago in the mind. Time’s flow gets weird. I cannotContinue reading “Twenty-Five Years Ago”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[126],"tags":[5237,5480,5481],"class_list":["post-35493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","tag-eb-games-2","tag-king-of-prussia-mall","tag-september-11","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35493\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}