9/11 with Dad

September 11, 2001, my father was at a hotel across the street from the Pentagon. He was presenting at a meeting with the Environmental Protection Agency in the top-floor conference room. 

Mom panicked when he didn’t answer his cell phone for hours. I called the hotel front desk and couldn’t get through. Dad was unreachable but unharmed.

He somehow managed to rent a car by evening and started driving home to Birmingham.  He found himself around Atlanta at 3am, too tired to keep driving. He stopped at my house to get some rest. 

He didn’t rest. He stayed up talking. He described seeing the plane fly by the conference room at eye-level. It was so loud. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing when the plane tilted and slid into the building. He couldn’t stop recounting what he’d seen, what he’d heard, what he felt. He thought he saw the pilot’s face. I just listened as we sipped seltzer water with lime as the sun rose. It was the first time he’d ever had “fizzy water.”

My father was not a chatty man. He only used the amount of words necessary. But that night, he could not stop talking from the shock of it all. We grew closer somehow.

Dad always had a seltzer water in his hand after that, but he never spoke about 9/11 again.