September Eleventh Two Thousand and One

I was sitting at the Lake County court with my C# book. I had my letter from Comparison Market to try to defer my jury duty to another day.I got there a bit before 8:30 in the morning when I was supposed to report in. I handed over my letter and was sitting on a bench near the bailiff.8:46 - the first plane hits the north tower"I heard a bomb went off in New York" from the office about a building in New York.The deferral was granted and I was good to get back to work.Getting back in in my old Infiniti G20 in Chardon I started driving back on Route 2 towards work. Listening to the radio I heard of the other tower getting hit by another plane. At the time we were living in Willoughby and work was in Solon so it was on the way.9:02 - the second plane hits the south towerI called En (maybe she called me) on the way back to the apartment. I was convinced the towers would stay standing, especially since they didn't go down immediately.I stopped at my apartment and turned on the TV.9:37 - The plane hits the Pentagon9:59 - The south tower collapses10:03 - Flight 93 crashes in Pennsylvania10:28 - The north tower collapsesI left the apartment at around 11 or so in the morning. Being alone wasn't something that I was looking forward to. I went to work since I didn't have anything else to do.I got to work.No one was doing work. The TV from the board room was carted back to where everyone's cubes were and was tuned to local news coverage. Everyone was watching.What could we do?12:30, the pall in the office became overwhelming. My boss and I went off to Scorchers. We were part of a small group of people at the bar at the time. I got some wings and collectively we all watched the news instead of the sports that was normally on. It was the quietest bar I'm remembering. A beer would have been nice.Getting back to the office one of the managers was starting to get all uppity about Muslims. I have friends that are Muslim. This was starting to get disconcerting.We looked at our application since we had nothing else we could do. It was an online auto insurance system. Someone got a quote.?At around 3 in the afternoon we were all sent home. Nothing was getting accomplished at the office. Why coop people up anyway, Driving home I looked up at the sky. It was a beautiful blue sky. The lack of contrails was stark in their absence. The traffic was almost nonexistent too.Turning the TV on there's more coverage of what's going on. Of course that will continue for days and days. (That TV's done a round-trip to Iraq by now -- maybe two)The thing that got me was I couldn't do anything. If there was something I could do to make anything better it would have made me feel better. All we could do was nothing.Nothing but watch the world change.