In Memory - 9-11

Can't believe it has already been near a decade since the tragedy of September 11th.

I was spending my nights as a bartender and sleeping my days away in 2001. That particular day, my boyfriend (at the time) and I had our typical late start that morning. We had planned to go apple picking. We woke up, got ready, and headed out the door. The TV was never turned on. We listened to CDs through the entire drive. I remember thinking how odd it was that we were pretty much the only people in the orchard picking apples during the kickoff of the season.. We remained blissfully ignorant until our ride home when I finally put on the radio. The shock of the news was unforgettable. I remained glued to Peter Jennings' broadcasts for the next 72 hours.

Where were you?

I was working a summer job at Boots in 2001 and it was about 3 weeks before I started university. I was working 2 shifts that day: 9.30-2.30 (I think) and 5-8. I drove home after the first shift and as I pulled into the driveway, I heard Chris Moyles talking about it on Radio 1 ('a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center') - at first I thought he was joking because it was Chris Moyles, but then I went into the house and my dad was watching it on the news... I came in just as the second plane hit. We watched it all unfolding on TV until I had to go back into work. The weirdest thing was that no one at work even knew about it yet because they had been there all day without access to the TV/news.

I was in French class, it was my first week of Junior year in high school.  They didn't want to say anything to anyone until they were certain what was going on, but rumors had been flying around.  I remember when they made the announcement.  The principal's voice sounded so strange.  A lot of students left school, since their parents worked in the city.  They didn't send the whole school home early though.  I guess they figured it was best to keep us there and keep things as normal as possible.  But obviously the teachers were freaked out too, so it was a really strange day of going through the motions.  One of our guidance counselors was pregnant, she lost her husband in one of the towers.

Such an upsetting thing.  I remember when I finally got home from school, I couldn't stop watching the TV.  I couldn't believe it was real.

I worked for a mutual fund company in St Petersburg, Florida, and we were all already at work and all.  I think the phones may have gone quiet & there was murmuring something about our supervisor was going to get us all together to make an announcement, etc.  And she did.  So then we were all glued to the internet news really more than working by that point.  It was all still happening & lots of confusion about the specifics.  I rang my brother, who is a commercial airline pilot, to make sure he was okay as I had no idea of his flight schedules & it still wasn't clear which airlines had been involved.  He was at home & not on work that day.  I think I rang my other brother too to make sure they were all alright, as they live in the Baltimore/Washington area.  At the time, he was a government worker (he's now retired) & his particular department were all on a very strict restriction against air travel for a period of time after that - if they had to go anywhere for work, it had to be by car.  Then I rang my mom to let her know that they were all okay, except she was pretty doolally by then already & didn't have any comprehension of what was going on.  I'm not sure my grandma did either.

My employer closed the offices down (we didn't have to go to work) for the next couple of days or so - however long the Stock Market was closed as a result.  Our offices only opened for days that the Stock Market was open too.

I was at work and hadn't heard anything until one of my co-workers turned on the TV and we watched the second plane crash. My boyfriend was back in the UK and due to fly back out to me again in a couple weeks and I had to go cry in the bathroom for a while, afraid that what was going on was bigger and going to keep us apart after we'd been waiting so long to be together. (He'd just finished his masters degree and was coming over for a 3 month visit - at the end of which he proposed, which is why I'm here now.)

He said the flight a week or so later was completely empty. It was eerie and everyone was uncomfortable.

I don't think anyone will ever forget where they were and what they were doing...

I was a senior in high school in Miami, and was walking down the hallway to get to my next class when one of my friends (a gorgeous guy I had a huge crush on, actually...) popped his head out of a doorway and said "Lucie! someone just flew a plane into a building! It's some kind of terrible accident!" and I thought OMG how awful!

I ran to my classroom and the TV was already on...as we watched, the second plane hit the building. The shock and horror I felt was...indescribable. Everyone was crying and speculating, and my chemistry professor (who's best friend worked in the World Trade Center) had to leave the room. We just sat and watched...the pentagon was hit, the towers collapsed. Everything. My mom works for the government and she was evacuated out of her building and came to pick me and my sister up from our respective schools. Then I spent the rest of the day at home just in a daze.

I was working in Midtown Manhattan. I worked for a media company, so we had a TV in the lunchroom. When I came in to work in the morning, people were saying something about a plane crash and I wasn't sure if they were talking about something in a movie, a real accident or what.

I went into the lunchroom where a lot of other people were watching the news on the TV screen. We saw the first plane crash and it looked like it could have been an accident. Then as the news was on we saw the second plane crash and from that you could tell that the whole thing wasn't an accident.

I remember spending hours trying to get home to Brooklyn among the crowds of people. I think it took me around 8 hours or so to get home. I had to go north, in the opposite direction to Brooklyn, to the 59th street bridge into Queens, then take a train from Queens back to Brooklyn, then take a bus home.  I was with a coworker who was 8 months pregnant.  She got a lot of rides part of the way from strangers.

A sort of amazing thing is that my sister worked in the World Trade Center complex (not in one of the two towers but in one of the smaller buildings that was  destroyed when the towers collapsed) but she didn't go to work that day. The reason was that when she woke up that morning she had found a lump on her neck and her husband freaked out because his mother had died of thyroid cancer and he ordered her to see a doctor immediately. It turned out that she has a thyroid condition but nothing nearly as serious as cancer, so she was very lucky.  Of course, nobody told me that she was going to the doctor that day so I was freaking out when I couldn't get in contact with her.

I was a junior in high school in central NJ and heard sometime around 3rd period (10ish in the morning?)  Everyone was freaked out because so many of my friends and classmates had parents who worked in the towers or very nearby.  One kid I didn't know went home on his lunch hour and was able to see the burning from where he lived (my town is really big and most of it is inland but there's a little chunk that is on the water, right across the bay from lower Manhattan). One of my closest friend's dad was a lawyer for the Port Authority and almost NEVER went to court, really, since he was mainly a transactional lawyer but he was in court that day and luckily, she knew that.  But our other close friend lost her father and she was a mess.  The administration handled it TERRIBLY.  We were not dismissed early, they tried to prevent parents from picking up or contacting their children during that school day and we didn't have off from school at all the next day or after.  And on September 12th, teachers were forbidden from treating it like anything but a normal day and were not allowed to mention it at all.  I was super freaked out and very sad and trying to process and so upset that we weren't allowed to talk about it!  

To top it off, I had just spent the whole summer studying Spanish in Spain which had completely changed my worldview and the way I thought about my country, etc (no one in my close family had ever traveled out of North America before). Then I came back and this terrible tragedy happened and people were using it as an excuse to whip out the knee jerk patriotism and it was all very confusing.  Yea,it was an awful tragedy but it was a tragedy for ALL people, not just Americans.  The flag waving and God Bless America singing and demonization of massive groups of people really got under my skin and I probably didn't handle it very well.  

Wow, it's crazy how emotional I've gotten just remembering this and writing this post.  All of the feelings are surprisingly fresh, even 9 years later.  Crazy.  It was such a traumatizing event....

I was in high school, and we initially got tidbits of something happening from word of mouth.  We initially heard it was an accidental plane crash, then it began circulating that it was more serious than that.  Our school tried to keep calm, wouldn't turn on the radios or televisions, and we were stuck with information we got through the grapevine.  Our teachers told us we needed to concentrate on having a normal day.

It didn't take long for more information to come trickling in, and by the time the seriousness of the situation became known, we were all pretty unruly.  The school agreed to turn on the news and we could watch it in class.

My mom picked me up from school and we went home to watch it all unfolding on the television.  Other students just got up and left.

I remember crying with several friends as we stared at the television, trying to figure out if the plane had hit the floors were Cantor Fitzgerald was.  

I remember being in a stupor all of the 11th and oddly enough it wasn't until I listened to Howard Stern the next day that I began pulling out of it. Later that day there was a huge biker in line in front of me at Publix and he was weeping so hard his shoulders were shaking. Everybody around him misted up....

I was driving in to my journalism class at a community college. We had just finished the issue for the past 2 weeks, and it was due to go out. But, because of the tragedy, we scrapped the entire issue and made how the tragedy affected all of us at the college the main focus instead. We had the tv on the entire day, which we never did. The streets were empty, and it was really really quiet everywhere. I couldn't believe that it was really happening, even though it was happening. It was the most surreal day I've ever had.

I hardly ever watch TV but that morning I woke up really early for some reason, so I decided to make some coffee and watch the news.  I must have gotten bored and turned it off just moments before the first plane hit.  At the time I was working on my MA so I sat and wrote until a couple of hours later when I went to work.  The secretary had an old TV that she was trying to get some reception on, which was a bit wierd, and I helped her rig up a makeshift antenna from a paperclip.  She didn't tell me why she was trying to watch the news, but as soon as we got a picture I could see what was going on.  I saw both of the tower collapses live, and the footage of people jumping from the upper floors.  Horrible.

My boss later said "this changes everything".  She was right, but I wish it had been in the direction of greater unity and understanding, both at home and in the world in general.  I think America missed a big opportunity for learning, and for peace. 

When I came in to work in the morning, people were saying something about a plane crash and I wasn't sure if they were talking about something in a movie, a real accident or what.

I had a similar experience when leaving my school during the '93 WTC bombings.  I heard a bunch of people talking about it on the street and thought they had all gotten out of a cinema or something.  It was when I got home and finally saw the news (on the only channel broadcasting from the Empire State building rather than the Twin Towers) that I realised someone had actually bombed the WTC.

During 2001, I was with my then fiancé (and now husband).  We didn't turn on the telly all morning (which isn't odd).  I was reading Crime and Punishment most of the morning.  We decided we were going to go out during the afternoon.  While he shaved and got ready, I turned on the TV and tuned it to a Canadian station to see if I could catch my soap early.  It must have been around 1 PM.  The broadcast was in French, and I could see a building was on fire.  I told Mr A that I thought that something had happened in France until I began to recognise the surroundings.  Once it sunk in, we just sat there shocked watching replays of the day's events.

We went to a friend's house to call my family and because we just had to talk to someone.  The streets were deserted.  Our friends live near a National Guard Armory, and there was a tank out front.  The only people we saw were the National Guard and their vehicles.  We stopped in a convenience store to get money out, and the only people in there were soldiers and the cashier.  The deserted streets, military presence, and shock were chilling and still evoke those emotions when I remember it.

We got to our friends' house and others had congregated there.  We called our families and watched CNN.  It all got to be too much, and we headed back home.

I was a senior in Uni- had just finished an engineering stats analysis exam, when my friend burst through the door yelling, "We're at war. A plane hit the twin towers" and we were like "Huh?"   - I was supposed to then go to another class at 9 am, but we were sent home.  Classes were cancelled...   I was on the bus back home, when the radio was blaring and we heard on the news that the second one hit the twin towers... We sat, watching all the news,watching everything unfurl before us... Flight 93 and the Pentagon flight...and the collapsing...we were just in shock. The uni was closed and we were on high security alert.  I remember going and picking up my paycheck from work and the streets were empty and just profound sadness.  

My friend, an art student, stumbled in the middle of the afternoon, wondering why we were all in the room,watching the tv... he had been in the studio since 6 am and hadn't heard a thing.  

I went to school in Lowell,Ma, and John Ogonowski, the American Airlines Flight 11 pilot  grew up in Lowell, went to my University, and had lived in Dracut, MA which was right next to Lowell. My marching band played a very moving memorial remembrance ceremony for him that weekend.  His family was all there, it was horrible...  Not a dry eye around...