Remembering September 11

September 11, 2001 - I was a college junior; twenty years old, still mostly consumed in my adolescent self-centeredness. I was asleep in my bed in the dorm, recovering from the grueling (emotional, exciting, exhausting) experience of sorority recruitment. It was the day after Bid Day and I intended to sleep for most of it.

Then the phone rang. It was Dave. He never called in the mornings, so I knew something was wrong. It was a very short conversation: "Have you seen the news? Get up and turn on the TV."

I went across the hall to the chapter room (our common area on the sorority hall) and turned on the TV. He had to explain to me what was happening because I just couldn't get my head around it. Then I watched as United Airlines flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. And I continued to watch the news for the rest of the day and the tower fell, the Pentagon was hit, the plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Classes were cancelled, though some professors were there with TVs tuned to the news if you wanted to stay and watch. I didn't. I needed the relative privacy of the dorm.

I remember feeling wide-eyed with shock. For the first time in my life I understood what it felt like when history is made, when text books get revised and the course of a nation changes forever. I finally understood the definition of terrorism.

I remember the horror of watching the tower fall, of seeing the people being thrown or jumping from the windows, of the people in the streets covered in ash.

I remember feeling sympathy for the president, newly inauguarated after a hard-fought campaign and the drama of a recount in Florida, and there he was, addressing the country and scrambling, I'm sure, to figure out what should happen next.

I couldn't comprehend the magnitude of the impact on our transportation systems, our economy. The New York Stock Exchange shut down for a week. Air travel stopped for two days. The entire nation stood still in shock.

Later that week I attended a candlelight vigil on campus and I bought a copy of Newsweek with the Twin Towers aflame on the cover. That magazine is still in my keep box.

Weeks later, I was looking through some pictures from a trip I took in highschool and I found one I had taken from the plane of the NYC skyline, Twin Towers intact. I've never spent more than an layover in NYC, but I'm glad I have that picture.

I decided to write this today because I want to make sure I never forget where I was that day and how I felt while watching that horror unfold on live television. I want to make sure that my children understand that 9/11 isn't just an event they will read about in their history books - it was real and people died and an entire nation came to its knees that day.