This morning, I turned the news on and the guest said that he feels old when he tells his children about what he was doing in 2001 today. He said that, “Everybody has a 9/11 story.” As I watched the news this morning, I began to cry. Today has always been somber for me since then and while I worked and we had our moment of silence to commemorate the lost souls when the planes hit.
My students were all too young or not even alive when that happened and one year, a student asked me what it was like. Of course I remembered what I was doing but took me a moment to gather my thoughts. I was speaking to children who had no idea about it so I didn’t want to say do much but I just said that I was in college and I was pregnant and yes I remember.
Just this morning, I afriended a former student of mine on Facebook. He is a man now and NOT skinny 12-year-old kid. That’s insane to me!
I’m especially sad today so I will share my full 9/11 story that I don’t have to truncate for children. I don’t think that I have shared the story and it’s entirety before…
I was in an auditorium in my psychology class at U of M-Dearborn when the first plane hit. Lights were off and we were taking notes from the projector. Class ended and I was headed to my second class of the day down the hall and there was lots of buzz in the hallway. I didn’t know what was going on.
Once I got to the next class, the woman who always sat to my left was explaining to me what what’s going on. Then this guy, another student in the class, entered into the doorway and exclaimed, “The second tower just fell!” The professor came into the room just after he did and the woman sitting next to me me began to bawl. She used to work in the second tower.
The prof looked at the woman and told us to find a TV on campus somewhere and that class was canceled. I left the building headed toward the library and I called my Mom. It was strange that time almost seemed to standstill and everything seems so surreal! I received a phone call from my son’s dad and my Mom decided to call my brothers.
Images of that day keep playing in my head on loop and even 19 years later, because I am in my house, I am crying on and off.