September 11, 2011
Ten years ago today …
It was a beautiful Tuesday morning in Virginia. I walked out of my college apartment bedroom and my roommate, heading off to her kickboxing class, said: “have you heard? A plane hit the World Trade Center.” My immediate assumption was that this was a small aircraft ... a sightseer must have made a mistake ... and an accident happened. I turned on the tv and saw the massive smoke cloud pouring out of the building. I was shocked. How could so much smoke come from a small plan? Moments later the journalists were stunned when a second large jet plane crashed into Tower One. It was clear to them then that none of this was an accident. Suddenly they cut to DC where smoke was pouring out of the Pentagon, the cause uncertain. Soon witnesses reported that an airplane had had crashed there as well. Then Tower One fell; Smoke blanketing the city, pouring through the streets. People running for there lives. Only then did it occur to me to find a blank tape, put into the VCR, and hit 'record.' Moments later, Tower Two fell, again blanketing all of lower Manhattan. Our classes were not immediately canceled, so I walked to school. My statistics teacher made it clear, terrorists were not going to stop him from doing his job. The rest of my classes were canceled. That evening I went with my other roommate to the grocery store to get things we needed, and some things for his girlfriend's Birthday which was the next day, she was turning 21. We saw one plane flying alone in the calm blue sky. I didn't even realize that this day was my parent's thirty-seventh wedding anniversary, now their anniversaries are hard to forget.
