“Outside the delivery guy said, ‘Wow, that’s pretty amazing what happened,’” she says. “He told me about the plane crashing into the Pentagon but not the World Trade Center.” As she recalls, the image in her mind was of a relatively small plane. “So I came inside and we turned the television on. Even though I’d come in to say that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon, you could see that obviously the World Trade Center was a much bigger deal.”
In addition to watching television most of the day, she recalls three conversations in particular. One was with her sister, who had travelled to Kansas City to catch a flight to Oregon with her husband and three children, a flight that kept getting cancelled. Another was the woman doing her hair, who was being yelled at by a guy who had come into the salon. “He said that when we find out who did it we need to carpet bomb the country from one end to the other,” she says. “I knew the woman doing my hair was married to a man who is Lebanese, but she agreed with the guy who was shouting, and I knew that things were going to change for the worse.”
Then she talked to her brother. “I told him that this was going to be a big wake-up call for America,” she says. “I said we can’t keep mucking around in other countries. He said ‘Someone’s in for a wake-up call, but it’s not us.’”
