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Where Were You on Sept. 11?
By Jim Moore, Editor of TennTimes - the News

Those of us old enough to remember November 22, 1963 have two events we will always remember where we were when we had that experience. The other is September 11, 2001.

About 39 years ago, I was a freshman in college at the University of Kansas. I lived in a "scholarship house" with a housemother and about 35 male students (fraternity without a name?) and it was lunchtime.

The housemother came into the dining room from her private quarters and said, quite simply, "there's something wrong with the television set."

What was "wrong" was the horrible news of Dallas, Texas crackling around the world.

On Sept. 21, 2001, I was quite sublime in my ignorance.

I'd been out in the front yard raking leaves and cleaning up. Where I live - on the far side of a distant hill - I can get no TV reception at all and very little radio.

On such a nice day, I wouldn't have been watching it if I did. I still would have been outdoors.

My neighbor called and said, in tears, that something terrible was happening and I should come over and look at the news on their TV.

That first sight of the plane hitting the World Trade Center made me ache physically - every nerve, every muscle, every molecule of my body cried out in agonizing silence, "Oh, dear God, please no!"

It still brings tears to my eyes even now as I write this line a year later.

The jumpers.

That was the most soul-ripping thing I have seen on television - ever. That made it so much more personal as you watched individual men and women plunging to their deaths - some with the serenity of angels.

One man and woman who apparently worked together held hands, looked each other in the face, smiled (according to some of the blowups) and stepped off into Eternity.

Some soared like eagles, their arms outspread and a look of confidence on their faces. They were going Home to God.

Others were frightened - their mouths open in screams we could not hear.

Sometimes as a reporter I have stood in Death's shadow, but never have I experienced anything like what I watched from 1500 miles away on 9-11.

Once, in my first newspaper job (Pratt, KS Daily Tribune), I 'b been sent by my editor to a farmhouse that was burning to the ground.

On the highway, on the way there, something happened. A station wagon full of Cub Scouts in front of me passed a semi and hit an oncoming car head-on. Right before my very eyes.

The kids weren't hurt bad, amazingly, most just shaken up. But as the afternoon sun dropped to the trees, I witnessed one of the most heart-breaking moments I have seen firsthand.

The woman in the car they hit was dying. She had been thrown from her car into a field.

I climbed the fence and approached the injured woman, who was lying on her back, her head in the lap of the man who had been in the car with her. Almost instantly, I sensed that I was – for the first time in my life – watching someone die.

I started to raise my camera and the man looked up at me. He never said a word, but I could see the most searing pain in his eyes, a pleading pain that cried out, “Please don’t do this!”

Confused, I lowered the camera as the impact of his agony hit me full force. Then I backed away. I could almost feel an invisible line I had crossed, a physical line in the dirt as well as an emotional and spiritual line of the soul.

Could there be any more private a moment than the moment of death? And what kind of human being was I to invade that privacy?

For a moment, I didn’t know what to do. I knew – or thought I knew – what my editor would expect. He would expect me to do my job.

But what was my job?

Was it to take a picture of a bloodied and torn woman as she breathed her last gasps of life? Was there an alternative? I had no idea what their relationship was to each other – husband and wife, lovers, friends?

Slowly, as inconspicuously as I dared, I circled around to catch a sinking sun behind them, as he cradled her head in his lap, sitting with her on the ground.

I didn’t show the blood and torn flesh, nor did I show the anguish in the man’s face as his companion was torn from him.

It was at that moment that I realized that death, even as sudden and traumatic as this was, was also a moment of grace and dignity.

I tried to capture that, along with the compassion and caring of the man whose face would be the last thing she ever saw.

Mission accomplished, I silently withdrew, casting to the heavens a silent prayer for her soul and his pain, then rushed on towards the original assignment, my hands trembling on the steering wheel.

I was able to get some good photos of the farmhouse, still a huge ball of fire, but the whole time, my thoughts were on an unknown man and a dying woman I had last seen in a Kansas wheat field.

September 11, 2001 was also such a day - but 3,000-fold more painful.

Nor will I ever forget the demons and the angels that mysteriously showed up in those early photos and videos from CNN and the Associated Press.

The demons appeared as face patterns in the smoke and flames - the angel appeared as a small object that first strikes you as a bird - a huge bird.

Clearly, both the lords of Light and Dark had gathered in Manhattan that crisp autumn morning. They descended suddenly, turning day into night.

Before I came back to home much later that afternoon, my neighbor and I stood in her front yard.

Facing each other, we held hands - like the couple who soared into the hereafter, and we prayed - four ourselves and our children and spouse, for our community and for our nation, and for the Family of Humankind, and we asked that the Father's will be done.

Life has never been the same since.

Jim Moore is manager of Phoenix Technologies, a website design and promotion service in Williamsport, TN, where he also serves as online editor of TennTimes - the News , America's largest online newspaper. He has won numerous writing and web design awards, is a member of the International Association of Webmasters & Designers and for eight years produced, directed and hosted "The Omega Report", a popular hour-long TV documentary cablecast into 1.5 million homes from Nashville to Boston. He publishes a free monthly newsletter, "On the Go!", for busy people like you. Subscribe here, or send an email to OntheGo-subscribe@topica.com. He may also be reached at .