Writer's Block: 9/11
I was ten and I was in Moscow at my grandparents’ house. (Parents were back home in California.) I was actually supposed to fly back home that day but there were some problems with the documents/paperwork at the airport so we went back home to fix everything before I could fly. My grandparents watched the news report on tv that night. I saw some of it too. It certainly didn’t hit me how big this was until I got home and everyone was talking about it. There were a few factors for this, I think: first, I was young and so had a hard time comprehending the enormity of such events and secondly, since this was in Russia there was only so much of this on the news - not like CNN where you could watch it for hours - and my grandparents were trying to kind of shield me from it. More importantly, though, I think, the mitigation came from the fact that for the last few years Russia was suffering from periodic terrorist act - a Moscow metro station blown up here, a huge apartment building blow up there. So this was like, “Oh, damn, those assholes blew something else up.” It didn’t really hit me until I got home and in the following years…