Where were you?

It was a beautiful Tuesday in Italy, the archaeological site of Ostia Antica to be specific. As usual I had taken the trains to the site in order to study the pottery from the DAI/AAR excavations, arriving by about 9:00. The day was routine…examining the pottery the excavating team had recovered in order to provide them with dating evidence for the stratigraphic sequence. We always had lunch at a certain point in the midst of the ruins where tourists seldom arrived, beneath the umbrella pines. Then back to work in the storerooms… I would meet my 88-year old grandmother and aunt and uncle in the center of Rome in the evening for dinner, so I left the team a little earlier, around 3 p.m. I nearly fell asleep on the train home, walked to my car and started the engine. As I approached the train crossing another train was approaching, so the barrier came down. I waited in my car and was stuck by an Italian guy pacing frantically in the road speaking in an agitated manner on the phone. He seemed like a journalist, but who knows. He kept saying phrases (in Italian) like “I can’t believe this.” “It is war.” “There is a war and now what are we going to do.” I heard him mention New York. Who knows…Italians always exaggerate. I arrived home after ten minutes and started getting ready when the phone rang. It was my sister-in-law. She asked in a frantic manner (her normal tone) “Oh my god, how are your parents (in New York). Are they OK? What is happening? They dropped bombs or something.” Of course I had no clue what she was talking about so I asked her and she told me about the Twin Towers and that I should turn on the TV. I turned on the TV and like billions of other people in the world, thought “Oh my god. What the hell is happening?” It was like a dream…the images repeating over and over, the planes crashing into the Twin Towers and images of the towers collapsing. All I could do was sit on the bed and stare at the TV.