Sandwiches
I don't know why I just remembered this, but:
When the first Gulf War started (I mean the beginning of the bombings) I was 10. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my sister and my mom, and we were making dinner because my dad was going to get home from work soon. We were having sandwiches and chili, and the sandwiches we had finished pretty well, but my mom couldn't remember exactly how the chili recipe went (she wasn't really the cook of the family) so she called my dad at work to ask. He told her to turn on the news. We turned on CNN (we couldn't have had cable for that long at this point, or a color TV even, so this was fairly exciting) and I remember the green streaks across the screen. And not really understanding what I was looking at or what was happening. I don't remember being scared at that point. It didn't look like war. It looked like a computer game.
When the planes hit the World Trade Center, I was 20. I had just returned from a second stint of living in New York, and I was working back at this coffee shop in the town where I was going to college. I was in the kitchen, making sandwiches, when my boss's brother came in and said to turn on the radio, that there had been some horrible accident in New York. When we turned it on, just then, the second plane hit. And we knew it wasn't an accident, but we didn't know what was happening. Everybody got real quiet. And I didn't know if my friends were dead or trapped or smashed or broken or perfectly fine in Brooklyn somewhere. I went outside and cried for a while and wiped my face on my apron and went back to work. It wasn't until hours later that I saw the first pictures of it on TV, through the window of a bank I passed on my way to the El. That looked real. That looked like war.
When the first Gulf War started (I mean the beginning of the bombings) I was 10. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my sister and my mom, and we were making dinner because my dad was going to get home from work soon. We were having sandwiches and chili, and the sandwiches we had finished pretty well, but my mom couldn't remember exactly how the chili recipe went (she wasn't really the cook of the family) so she called my dad at work to ask. He told her to turn on the news. We turned on CNN (we couldn't have had cable for that long at this point, or a color TV even, so this was fairly exciting) and I remember the green streaks across the screen. And not really understanding what I was looking at or what was happening. I don't remember being scared at that point. It didn't look like war. It looked like a computer game.
When the planes hit the World Trade Center, I was 20. I had just returned from a second stint of living in New York, and I was working back at this coffee shop in the town where I was going to college. I was in the kitchen, making sandwiches, when my boss's brother came in and said to turn on the radio, that there had been some horrible accident in New York. When we turned it on, just then, the second plane hit. And we knew it wasn't an accident, but we didn't know what was happening. Everybody got real quiet. And I didn't know if my friends were dead or trapped or smashed or broken or perfectly fine in Brooklyn somewhere. I went outside and cried for a while and wiped my face on my apron and went back to work. It wasn't until hours later that I saw the first pictures of it on TV, through the window of a bank I passed on my way to the El. That looked real. That looked like war.
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