9/11
I'll jump on the bandwagon and post my remeberances from 9/11/01.
I was 17, a senior in high school, living in Washington State. Earlier that year, in April, I had gone to New York for a week long band trip, somewhere there's a picture of me standing on top of the World Trade Center. Can't really tell where I was at, it was dark out at the time, but that's where I was. I will always wonder about the man who opperated the elevator. A tall black man, wearing a sharp uniform, jokeing around with a bunch of kids from a small town all the way across the country.
I was checking my email (on our fancy dial-up internet!) when my mom called me to the basement to watch what was happening on the TV. The second tower had been hit. Mom had to get dressed for work and I stayed and watched the TV. I clearly remember yelling up the stairs at her, "Mom! They just hit the Pentagon!" "WHAT?!?" "The Pentagon! Another plane just hit the Pentagon."
I got to my 7am Jazz Band class late that morning. Everyone knew something was happening, but no one knew WHAT was happening. All us kids were very distracted. The immortal words of our idiot band director still ring clearly in my mind, "Ok guys. I know we're having a national emergency here, but we have a competition in two weeks and we are NOT ready! You need to concentrate on what we're doing."
That afternoon I rushed home at lunch break and printed of pictures from online. After returning to school I went to my English class, sitting in my desk show to my classmates the pictures of firemen standing on rubble, the top of the tower on the ground behind them, smoke rising, and people running. As we were looking at those photos the principle came over the intercom, there was a bomb threat at the school.
The rest of that day is pretty much a blur. I know the bomb threat was a hoax, I think we went back to class, but I'm not really sure.
There are two other things that stand out about that time. One, I WISH I'd gotten a picture of, was an American flag that I passed every day on the way to school. The flag, at half mast, framed against the bright blue desert sky and the golden brown of the hills around the town where I lived, was a striking image.
The second was 3 days later when the FAA resumed flights. It was somewhere around 830am and we were all out on the football field practicing our halftime show (band again, have I mentioned that band took over my life at the end of high school?) when, as one, we all stopped what we were doing. Idiot Mr Walter didn't even yell at us this time because he had stopped too. After the silence of 3 days with no air traffic we heard the sound of a C-130 (big military plane) landing at our town's little airport. I've never before, and probably never will again, felt so much trepidation watching an airplane come in for a landing.
I was 17, a senior in high school, living in Washington State. Earlier that year, in April, I had gone to New York for a week long band trip, somewhere there's a picture of me standing on top of the World Trade Center. Can't really tell where I was at, it was dark out at the time, but that's where I was. I will always wonder about the man who opperated the elevator. A tall black man, wearing a sharp uniform, jokeing around with a bunch of kids from a small town all the way across the country.
I was checking my email (on our fancy dial-up internet!) when my mom called me to the basement to watch what was happening on the TV. The second tower had been hit. Mom had to get dressed for work and I stayed and watched the TV. I clearly remember yelling up the stairs at her, "Mom! They just hit the Pentagon!" "WHAT?!?" "The Pentagon! Another plane just hit the Pentagon."
I got to my 7am Jazz Band class late that morning. Everyone knew something was happening, but no one knew WHAT was happening. All us kids were very distracted. The immortal words of our idiot band director still ring clearly in my mind, "Ok guys. I know we're having a national emergency here, but we have a competition in two weeks and we are NOT ready! You need to concentrate on what we're doing."
That afternoon I rushed home at lunch break and printed of pictures from online. After returning to school I went to my English class, sitting in my desk show to my classmates the pictures of firemen standing on rubble, the top of the tower on the ground behind them, smoke rising, and people running. As we were looking at those photos the principle came over the intercom, there was a bomb threat at the school.
The rest of that day is pretty much a blur. I know the bomb threat was a hoax, I think we went back to class, but I'm not really sure.
There are two other things that stand out about that time. One, I WISH I'd gotten a picture of, was an American flag that I passed every day on the way to school. The flag, at half mast, framed against the bright blue desert sky and the golden brown of the hills around the town where I lived, was a striking image.
The second was 3 days later when the FAA resumed flights. It was somewhere around 830am and we were all out on the football field practicing our halftime show (band again, have I mentioned that band took over my life at the end of high school?) when, as one, we all stopped what we were doing. Idiot Mr Walter didn't even yell at us this time because he had stopped too. After the silence of 3 days with no air traffic we heard the sound of a C-130 (big military plane) landing at our town's little airport. I've never before, and probably never will again, felt so much trepidation watching an airplane come in for a landing.