Remembering 9-11

[jordan179]

Ten years ago today, it was the morning after an all-nighter. I was taking out the garbage outside my apartment in Little Egg Harbor, NJ. The skies were clear. Thunder rolled out of a cloudless sky. I looked around, but could see neither a stormcloud nor a supersonic airplane. And the sound was strangely protracted. I shrugged, went back

Comments

[gothelittle]

I was on my way to work, listening to the news on my car radio. When I heard that "an airplane had crashed into the Twin Towers", I thought it was this little four-seater deal and some pilot had gotten lost... very lost. When the second hit, my first thought was, "This is an attack."

I didn't know they were passenger liners until I got up to my cubicle, where people were gathered around a radio and all the internet traffic had taken down all the local and national news websites.

With seven unaccounted-for planes in the air, I decided heck with this, and I went home. (I was a part-time casual employee at the time, I could get away with it.) As soon as I signed on at home, a ton of online friends who only knew that Connecticut is next to New York messaged me in a panic to see if I was still ok.

The thing I remember best after 9/11, though, was the aftermath. My house sits under an air road. For fourteen days after the attack, there was no sound of distant engine humming *at all*. Nothing. I hung my clothes out under a clear blue sky... silence.

Fourteen days after the attack, I was cleaning the kitchen (remember I only worked part-time) when I heard a helicopter motor. I ran outside on the deck and watched it until it went out of sight.

[marycatelli]

I heard the first online, thought it was a little one, too, but logged off to go have breakfast anyway. (Unemployed -- laid of the Friday before.)

Then my sister called me from work and told me to turn the TV on.

What I remember best was all the rumors. I remember that the plane that went down in Pennsylvania was just one of them for several hours, until I read online a posting from Jerry Pournelle who knew -- either the father or father-in-law of one man on the plane. He was posting about the man's last conversation with his wife, so that was the point where that rumor became real.