Tag Archives: hurrican irene

I felt the earth move under my feet…

Where were you during the earthquake? Where were you during Hurricane Irene? Did you lose power? Do you remember seeing the World Trade Center towers fall down? Do you remember when John Lennon was killed? Martin Luther King, Jr.? JFK? Bobby Kennedy? Do you remember exactly where you were when you heard that Jerry Garcia had died? Osama bin Laden?

Memory is a funny thing. We spin stories to make our memories stick. This year has held a lot of endings for me, deaths, graduations, moving away and onward. I don’t much like it. Six months after my sweet Grandma died I still miss her terribly. Two and a half months after losing my father-in-law I still can’t believe he is gone. My daughter left for college this week. I didn’t shed a tear though. It didn’t feel like an ending to me but rather an exciting, glorious beginning.

I was eating a Greek salad in a diner during the earthquake. They were filming a television show on the street outside the window. I mostly slept through Hurricane Irene, but then that bitch stole my electricity for 5 days and created so much cleanup work. I watched on my friend’s television when the Twin Towers fell, talking on the phone with my husband, who watched from a rooftop in Brooklyn. As the building fell I felt the world change. I was horrified. I was a freshman in college when John Lennon died. I was a baby when MLK was taken from us, when the Kennedy’s were assassinated. I was in the Hamptons with my baby and people I didn’t know when I heard the news that Jerry had died. I cried. I loved Jerry. I heard about Osama bin Laden on the radio. It was surreal.

What stories do you tell? What do you remember?


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