7 Years Later: What I Still Vividly Remember

9/11 WILL PROBABLY be rememberd as the defining day in the life of people my age. As someone who was living in Washington, DC on September 11, 2001, it was obviously an incredible day on so many levels. Because I don't want to forget the events of that day, I spent my drive home from work today thinking about what I remember most about that morning:

• It was a beautiful, cool morning with virtually no clouds in the sky
• I heard the news while sitting at my desk. A colleague came and asked if I had heard that a plan hit the World Trade Center. I assumed it was a small private plane or something like that, but I wasn't sure so I went to the library where a few other teachers were huddled around a small television. We saw the second plan hit and instinctively knew something was terrible wrong.
• I've got to call Kerri.
• The planes hit around 9:00am and my first class (Freshman!) was at 9:30. We had televisions in every room so I briefly explained the situation and we began to watch.
• The televisions were all set to Fox News.
• My dear friend Kevin called sometime before 10:00. He was travelling into DC from Northern Virginia. Our call was cut off.
• Moments later Fox News reported that smoke was billowing up from the Pentagon.
• I was sitting in a classroom about 15km from the Pentagon. Kevin had just driven past the Pentagon.
• When the first tower collapsed (the unthinkable had happened) I turned off the television, turned to my students, and asked if someone wanted to pray. At that moment I thought the death toll was going to be in the 10s of thousands.
• My students began to get scared when the news reported that some planes were still unaccounted for and that it was believed some might headed to Washington.
• Kevin finally got out of downtown DC and met me at my school where we watched the coverage together with my students.
• Parents began arriving to pick up their kids.
• One student wondered if the day's events meant we wouldn't have homework.
• Kerri and the kids had just dropped-off her parents at the airport -- they were scheduled to fly to California that morning. They never got on the plane.
• An incredibly lound noise briefly got my heart-rate up, until I realized it was fighter jets patrolling the skies.
• My goodnes, I have friends who live in New York!
• The television footage that afternoon was stunning. I remember the doctor who almost got smothered by the debris.
• The firemen. The police. The rescue workers. The slight humming sound (which I later learned were the alarms that firemen wore that go off if they remain motionless for a long period of time)
• The looks on the faces of New Yorkers are they fled the south part of Manhattan island.
• This photograph of a NY fireman walking up one of the towers as others were walking down. The fireman had walked up nearly 50 floors when this photo was taken

I could go on and on. Even as I write I think of other things. As the day stretched to a week there are other things that stick out in my head: the very quite skies (my in-laws live fairly close to an airport so there normally a lot of air traffic -- but for a week there was nothing); the lack of commercials on television (I think the first station that went to commercial break took that break nearly 5 days after the attacks); the worry that it might happen again; wanting to get a newspaper that I could keep forever.

CJS