Do you remember what you were doing on 9/11/2001?

[Verily]

I was a senior in high school. I found out while I was in second-period history. That's the only part of my high school schedule I remember: I had history second period on Tuesdays senior year. The Assistant Headmistress came in and said something quietly to our teacher. He went deathly pale, but kept quiet until the end of class, when he told us what had happened.

Our school was K-12. They told us not to tell the middle schoolers and lower schoolers what had happened, but word leaked pretty quickly anyway. My brother and I found our sister during lunch and brought her into the upper school. They told the middle schoolers after lunch, but she stayed with us for the rest of the day.

My chemistry teacher broke down in the middle of class and ran out of the room crying. That was the last class they even tried to hold that day. We just hung around outside; it was a beautiful day, and you could see the smoke clearly over the ridge of the Palisades. And the fire trucks and ambulances headed to New York City.

We could have walked home. It would have been far for my sister, but she could have made it. Neither my brother nor I had driven that day. The buses were cancelled because they had been commandeered by the NJ state government. A lot of people who lived far away and had both parents in New York City stayed on campus, so we did, too.

My mother worked in SoHo at the time. She saw everything--both planes hitting, and both towers collapsing--from her office window. She eventually walked all the way from SoHo to the George Washington Bridge to get home, and got across the bridge around 9 p.m.

My father was in Virginia at a State Department conference. He drove all the way home that day to pick us up from school. He got there around 7:30 p.m. after leaving Virginia around 11 a.m. He told us about streams of emergency vehicles from towns as far away as Central PA clogging up all the highways. He eventually picked my mother up from the bridge after she finally got across.

The father of a girl from my school who I didn't know well (I don't even remember her name, just her face) died. I distinctly remember her crying uncontrollably outside the Headmistress's office.

School was closed for the rest of the week. My mother was at home for two weeks because all of Manhattan south of 14th St--which included her office--was closed to non-residents. My father had to go back to work the next day because the UN diplomats were panicking. The rest of us stayed home and watched the news pretty much straight.

A slightly odd addendum: One of my uncles had been on the same flight from Portland, Maine to Boston as Mohammed Atta and one of the other hijackers, and had in fact even spoken to them. (He was on his way to Baltimore.)

Also, meh to the people who lament the loss of the WTC buildings. They were ugly eyesores, and no one in New York liked them until there was an aura of grief about it.