Let’s roll

“Where were you … ?”

Without it being said, we all know what follows the beginning of that question because those three words is all it takes for any American to transport themselves back to the morning of September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives to the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania.

My story is much like anyone else’s.

I was 23, working as a restaurant manager at the Denny’s in Prospect Heights, about 40 miles east of Huntley, 40 miles too far away from my wife, who was at our condo in Lake in the Hills that morning.

I was in the small, slightly grungy office, counting money, preparing that day’s bank deposit. The safe was open behind me, and I had a neat row of bills lined up on the Formica desktop, my fingers working a ticker-tape calculator, when Lorenzo, an in-house Denny’s repair man, busted through the service door (which was one walk-in freezer away from the office door) and knocked on the closed office door.

Seeing who it was, I opened up, and Lorenzo asked, “Does the TV in the break room work?”

“Yeah, not good, but yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“They say a plane just flew into the World Trade Center,” he said. “It’s all over the radio.”

“Like what? An accident?”

I remember this conversation verbatim. I also shamefully remember not knowing exactly what the World Trade Center was. Yes, I knew it was in New York. And, yes, I knew the Twin Towers, but I didn’t know that’s what they were.

“They don’t know,” Lorenzo answered. “Maybe. Maybe a terrorist attack.”

I closed up the office, securing a bank deposit inside that would never make it to the bank that day, and followed Lorenzo into the break room, where a few servers waited to start their shifts.

On the corner of the table sat an old, grimy 15-inch with actual knobs instead of buttons. Effie, one of the servers, proclaimed the TV hasn’t worked right in years and asked, of course, What’s going on? as he adjusted the rabbit ears (if you can believe that) and slapped the top a few times to stop the screen from jumping. As the TV picture came into focus, that machine became the thing on which I watched our world change forever. Hazy, skipping screen or not, it showed me, in more vivid detail than I care to remember, all I needed to know: near immeasurable sadness, fear, outrage, and that things would not be the same after that day was done.

The first tower was already burning, and Effie asked—well, not really asked but said—“Oh my God, is that real? Are there people in there? What happened?”

No one answered. We couldn’t; we didn’t know what happened besides the speculations of the media, which ranged from accident to terrorism to a jumbo jet to a small one-engine plane to it’s early enough that maybe there aren’t too many people in those offices.

I called my wife and told her she might want to turn on the TV, any station will do. She was already watching the television and said she would put in a call to my parents.

Next thing I remember, every employee was crammed into a break room the size of a small walk-in closet. Who was taking care of the diners, I have no idea. And within minutes, right before our eyes, we saw the second plane hit, and I swear if we all didn’t feel that right through the screen.

It wasn’t long after that our area manger arrived with the news that we might close up for the day; she was waiting on word from corporate. In the meantime, she had us move the TV out into the main dining room, where I placed it on top of the ice-cream cooler, facing the diner counter, where almost immediately those in the restaurant gathered.

I can stop my recollection here because here my story is really no different than anyone else’s. We were confused, suffering sadness, depression, outrage as we watched the atrocities and how exactingly they unfolded.

I will share one more lighter detail. When I went home at 5 p.m., traffic on the I-90 was an idiotic nightmare, nothing short of the near chaos you see with mass exodus.

Where that day is personal for me is in whom I shared it with because I was the only born-American citizen working that day in Denny’s, and I suspected that at least two of the six of us working that day weren’t even legal. But none of that mattered, because we were all impacted by those events. We all clung to each other for support and to get by and for our citizenship, legal or not legal, our ethnicity (them Hispanic, me Caucasian) didn’t matter because 9/11 wasn’t just an attack on America or even the world, but our humanity. And where humanity lives, we’re all the same.

It’s been ten years since 9/11, and I can hardly believe all that time has passed. Ten years, and it still feels like yesterday. Ten years of never forgetting. And ten years since Flight 93 Passenger Todd Beamer left us with the words, “Let’s roll.”

In memory of all those perished on September 11, 2001, I dedicate this edition of the Sun Day. We will never forget.

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