* Editor’s note: The following excerpts were pulled from submissions by dozens of Davis residents. For more, turn to the Forum and Op-Ed pages today.

We were a somber group of cooks for Davis Community Meals that tragic day. We met on our usual Tuesday at our usual hour in our usual kitchen at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church to prepare our usual community meal. Missing was our usual banter and laughter.

Enterprise 9/11 coverage

News:

Finally, World Trade Center rises from ground zero. 

After 9/11, searching for American optimism. 

Local ceremonies remember 9/11 attacks. 

A list of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack victims. 

Opinion:

‘Tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free. 

Fear is where we live now.

Each 9/11, I stop to remember.

Val Dolcini letter. 

Sarah Rozelle letter.

Our view.

What do you think?

We hugged, wiped our eyes on the hem of our aprons and spoke softly about what was happening in New York.

I was the last to leave. Not wanting to be alone, I went into the church office and asked the minister if the church was unlocked and if I could go inside. The Rev. Barry Beisner replied “yes” to both questions. I sat in a pew letting my tears fall.

Then I looked above and around me and thought of the many good people who had built this church, this refuge for all. I am not an Episcopalian, I’m a Unitarian. On that day, however, I felt the unity that can face tragedy and I found strength in knowing that all churches can and should be refuges.

— Corinne Cooke, Davis

I had no idea that I had been a complacent citizen until Sept. 11, 2001. Since I took my citizenship oath in December 1999, I had never had to question my loyalties or my patriotism. I was American by choice but I was still Indian in my heart. I had never quite given up the land of my birth and no one asked me to choose.

But on that horrific day in September, despite the balmy weather, I was drenched in a sweat of indecision. For the first time, a spark of patriotic fervor was ignited in my heart and I found myself weeping with the American nation.

The terrorists will never know that their terrible actions had a profound consequence — they gave birth to a new American patriot. My heart was no longer divided. I love India, my birth mother, but I love my adopted mother, the United States of America, more. I had made my choice.

— Meera Ekkanath Klein, Davis

I remember saying to my daughter on 9/11, ”I’m scared about what this could do to the country.”

She thought it would bring the country together, that the racial and ethnic divisions would dissolve in a national togetherness in response to 9/11. I thought it could usher in a new McCarthy era of paranoia, of persecution and loss of civil rights.

I remembered studying in political science how the government used a fear of communism to undermine civil liberties, so essential to a healthy democracy, and to force conformity.

I spent a lot of time pondering not just this 9/11, but other 9/11s. I thought about what it would have been like during the several hundred years when slave hunters descended on African villages with guns and other weapons, capturing and taking away as many of the able-bodied men and women as they could manage.

I imagined that every week, somewhere in Africa, there as a 9/11. I thought of the 9/11s in the villages of the Incas and the Aztecs when the conquistadors “discovered” and conquered the Americans.

My initial fears appear to have been realized as we have experienced a kind of hollowing-out of our democracy and as we witness 9/11s being visited on villages around the world. One wonders whether we have come very far from the tribes who used to attack and counterattack each other with spears, bows and arrows.

— Desmond Jolly, Davis

I was teaching high school English about 45 minutes from Pittsburgh on that incredibly beautiful, crisp fall morning. As my students quietly worked on their homework, a teacher friend came to my door, pulled me aside and said, “Turn on your TV … something big is happening in New York City.”

Horrified, we all watched as the second plane hit the tower. My students kept asking  if this was done for a movie or something as the realization that this was for real just did not and could not sink in.

Then I heard something about Somerset County and a plane down near Stoystown, Pa. What? My hometown of Central City, a tiny former coal mining town, is only about 10 miles away, and I just stared in disbelief at the screen as the announcer corrected the location to Shanksville.

A friend of our family was one of the first responders as hospitals readied for possible survivors. As he reported to us later, the trees at the edge of the clearing were burning but there was no sign of any airplane …. no parts, no fuselage, wings, nothing. Responders frantically searched for something to indicate a crash of an entire plane and thought their information might have been wrong. A wide gash in the earth was the only sign. Incredibly, he said a Bible lay on the ground, pages fluttering in the wind.

As later determined, Flight 93 had hit nose first and the wings had left that wide gash as the plane just disintegrated and buried itself into the ground, taking all with it.

— Mary Ann Doerzbacher, retired, moved to Davis in 2007 to be near family

On Sept. 11, 2000, I stood in front of One World Trade Center in Manhattan in search of Stephanie Blank, director of public relations with an upstart dotcom venture on the 84th floor.

I’d met Stephanie and her 1,000-watt smile the previous year as a reporter with AdWeek, attending the magazine’s soiree near its corporate office on Times Square. Now I was a news editor with Billboard, on my second visit to the Big Apple.

As I stood in the bustling lobby of the World Trade Center tapping Stephanie’s business card, I turned around, exited the building and got vertigo staring skyward up the towering columns.

A year later, on Sept. 11, 2001, a co-worker looked up from his computer at Billboard’s mid-Wilshire office in Los Angeles and told me a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center.

I’ve never contacted Stephanie, but I kept her WTC card as a 9/11 reminder. I’ve seen her photo and mention online so I know she didn’t perish when the towers imploded. The irony was that when the dotcom bubble burst in early 2001 — temporarily sending the economy into a tailspin — it likely forced Stephanie, and her nascent employer, out of the tower’s lofty confines — and fate’s grasp.

— Erik Gruenwedel, Davis High School Class of 1979, living in Orange County

Written in the days after Sept. 11, 2001: I have a sudden overwhelming admiration and appreciation for the firefighters, police officers, rescue workers and countless others who have lent a hand, offered help, comforted the victims, donated blood, put their dedication to service to others before their own welfare. Each and every one is a hero today.

I’m reminded of a story I received some time ago about a man and his daughter saying goodbye at the airport with the phrase, “I wish you enough…” When asked what that meant, the man said it was a wish that had been handed down in his family for generations. I share the sentiment:

I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.

I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more,

I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirits alive.

I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear bigger.

I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.

I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.

I wish you enough hellos to get you through the final goodbye.

Sorting through this series of surreal events, through layers of rage, grief and blame, I realize that to gain further meaning and to fully appreciate the joys in life again will take time.

— Joan Callaway, Davis

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