Leslie

On the morning of September 11th, Leslie called in sick to work. Not because of what was going on a continent from her home in San Francisco, but because she was actually sick. At around 5 that morning she left a voicemail message for her supervisor at the social services agency where she worked. Her timing turned out to be critical, because the agency reacted negatively to people who called in due to the trauma because they were unavailable to help those the agency served.

After making her call, she started the morning in the way she starts many mornings – by making coffee and getting comfortable on the couch. And then she turned on the television to watch the news.

“I was watching when the news broke,” she says. “They did that breaking news thing. The first tower had been hit and then, while I was watching, the second tower got hit and it was surreal.”

Leslie, who has worked in various aspects of marketing and fundraising throughout her career and who now lives in Portland, doesn’t focus so much on the events of that morning as she does the presentation of them. “Really, the second you start watching television it’s surreal because there is an element of fictionalization even if it’s real,” she says. “Everyone forgets that there’s a lot of editing. There’s a point of view, which by definition means there’s editing. But that morning it was completely real in that they didn’t know what was going to happen next. I mean, I’m sitting there watching a plane fly into a building.”

She stayed on the couch. She called her children, who lived in different states at the time. And she called a few friends. And then she had what she recalls as a “profound” conversation with her husband. “We were both saying that America had just joined the rest of the world,” she says. “We hadn’t been attacked on our mainland since 1812. We had come to believe as a country that having big oceans at many of our borders would keep us safe.”

A big part of Leslie’s perspective on the event is informed by places she’s lived. Of living in Florida during the Cuban missile crisis, she says “it got strange …” in reference to the period when it was believed that hiding under desks would protect people from nuclear blasts. And she spent a significant part of her childhood in South America, which trained her to look at the U.S. through an external lens. “In other places terrorism is a fact of life,” she says. “You cope with it. I didn’t think of September 11 as being any different, no more or less tragic. My husband and I talked about it that day as the beginning of a forced awareness.”