Zub Tales

I was giddy as I got on the C-Train in Calgary that morning and headed to the art college where I was teaching. The night before, I’d launched Makeshift Miracle on Keenspace and was eager to tell everyone at the school about it. Finally a chance to work on my own story and serialize it on the web.

When I came into the school grinning from ear to ear, people were in a stupor. Then someone told me –

“A plane crashed into the World Trade Center. It’s on fire.”

“That’s awful” I thought. What a terrible accident.

Then Dave, the head instructor, came in. His eyes were bulging as he spoke.

“A plane hit the second World Trade Center tower!”

Several of us replied. “We know a plane hit. We’re trying to get a TV set up here to see what the heck’s going on.”

“No… you don’t understand. A second plane rammed into the other tower!”

That’s when the gravity of it struck us. It wasn’t an accident at all and things weren’t just going to go back to normal.

Class that day was quiet and the students worked away on projects, sometimes chattering a bit about the towers. I would occasionally try to go to the CNN website to get info, but their servers were overloaded and rarely showed anything. One of the students I usually thought was pretty on the ball talked about how glad he was that it had happened, saying that “The U.S. was cocky and needed to get caught with their pants down” which absolutely stunned me. Who would ever wish for this kind of thing to happen to anyone?

I wrote about it all that night.

5 years later and the world is a very different place. Different home, different people, different career. But the memories of that day are still with me. I remember sitting on the couch in Sunnyside holding Gal as we watched the news footage play out. We wondered what would happen in the days to come.

Now we know… for better or for worse… now we know.