She recalls that she answered the phone and giggled as her mother sang the first verse – she estimates the song has between 30 and 40 – and then the bridge and then told her to go turn on the television. “She told me that planes had crashed into the tower and then at the Pentagon,” she says. “I asked her what was going on. She didn’t know. She told me to be careful.”
She says that even though she’d taken the day off she couldn’t resist calling a few people at work. And she was on e-mail, sending messages to people she knew in New York and receiving a few as well. A decade later one in particular stands out. “I received a ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’ message from someone I would not have expected it from,” she says. “It would bug me if I received a message like that today because it’s so tired, but back then I felt compassion because it was written from a place of fear by someone who had lived in New York.” But moments later, a friend who had also received the message replied to all that she believed the sentiment behind the original message was ridiculous. “The reply came within moments,” Luci says, “and the main point of it was ‘Hold on, let’s not grab our torches just yet.’”
She remembers the evening being like most other birthday evenings in one sense. “I like to be with friends on my birthday, so I invited people to meet up at Produce Row,” she says. “A few friends came.” While the gathering may have been in keeping with Luci’s birthday tradition, the conversation was not. “We talked about our fears,” she recalls. “We talked about the hawks swooping down. We talked about W and the New American Century.”
