“All changed, changed utterly”: A view from Chicago on 9/11

Ten years ago I was 23 and living like most do at that age: desperate, impoverished, wildly irresponsible.
I had graduated from Wayne State University months earlier, in July, with a hopeless English degree. I could theorize with the best of them about the novels of French writer Albert Camus or quote from poems by William Butler Yeats, but I couldn’t land a decent job.
Throughout college, I had alternately lived with my parents in the burbs or on-campus in Detroit. After graduation, I followed my brother and then-girlfriend to Chicago. The girlfriend was still in school and lived in a sprawling, three-bedroom Northside apartment. I moved in, the only dude among three ladies.
I was ready to light the world on fire.
But so were the terrorists.
I truly hustled to find any kind of work I could. I scoured the Want Ads in the Chicago Reader, the town’s alternative weekly. I made dozens of calls.
Only one called back: The Chicago Opera Theater.
I had worked as a telemarketer during my teenage years, experience that landed me an interview. I hated the thought of selling, but it wasn’t like I’d be hawking something sleazy like male enhancement pills over the phone, I’d be helping to support the arts.
I got the job. My first day would be September 12.
On September 10, knowing that I was starting a new job and I wouldn’t have the luxury of spending my days watching television through a haze of cigarette smoke all day, I celebrated my newfound employment deep into the night.
Probably a little too late.
I was still asleep when the first plane hit.
It was a collision that changed my generation. And there I was. Asleep. Hungover.
I didn’t have a cell phone yet, so the call came in on the landline. I’m surprised it wasn’t being tied up by the gossiping gals.
It was my brother.
“Turn on the TV now.”
“Dude, I’m sleeping,” I managed to utter.
“I’m serious.”
Out in the apartment’s “family room,” which had the habit of attracting stray party people at anytime of the week, the TV was already on. Four or five people sat around on old, second or third-hand sofas and love seats watching the news.
I don’t remember who was there anymore. But I do remember seeing the second plane hit.
For a generation of kids who thought that “everything had been done before,” this was something that dropped all of our aimless jaws.
“What the ... !” we collectively said.
Chicago has big buildings, especially the Sears Tower. We dared not leave the apartment for the rest of the day. Patriotism, something not typical in the grungy Northside apartment, became fervent.
As Yeats said, “All changed, changed utterly.”
We were glued to the television, watching the world utterly change. All those needless deaths were sickening. The reverberations are still being felt. I would argue that the economy still hasn’t fully recovered. Nothing has ever been the same since that day.
All changed, changed utterly.
The next day, when I had to start the new gig as a telemarketer, I figured they would send us home, but they didn’t. For a few hours, I made calls asking people if they wanted to buy tickets to see Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte.”
Most people hung up.
One guy said, “Do you know what just happened yesterday?”
I apologetically said I did and told him I was just doing my job.
He, too, hung up. The supervisor finally let us go home.
And we all did. But they weren’t the same homes anymore, all across the country.
All was changed, changed utterly.