Open Discussion:
What’s your 9/11 story?
We all have our own 9/11 story. For all too many it’s the loss of a loved one in the attacks, or the memory of fleeing a burning building, or frantically trying to get ahold of a loved one who may have been on a flight or in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.
But even for the rest of us—those of us who were home watching the news on television and saw the Breaking News graphic cut into our favorite morning TV show, or those of us who slept through the earliest news and woke up to see that our whole world had changed while we were sleeping—even we have our stories and may have been changed by that day.
This space is for you to tell your 9/11 stories, big and small, grand and simple, tragic and hopeful… However it happened to you, you’re welcome to share it here.
What’s your 9/11 story? Did the attacks and response of the heroes of that day change you in any way?
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My 9/11 story:
I was standing in Gerald Ford Airport headed back to Los Angeles from my small Midwestern hometown. As I lined up early to board my flight, suddenly all gate doors were bolted except the ones thrown open with people hustling through them, off their flights. We, the passengers, moved like a pack across the small terminal to the coffee shop with a TV, where we watched the first tower in the World Trade Center burn, small objects dropping from the highest windows. We asked one another, all strangers, “What is falling?” and then gasped as another stranger said, “They’re bodies. People are jumping.”
My mother had dropped me, and swung back around to get me again from the airport. When I got in the car, she was pale. “I can’t reach your brother. No one’s cell phones will work.” We knew he could be one of two places – working in the Pentagon or in New York City, where he took a subway under WTC every day on his way to Columbia for his graduate program.
We located him, taking cover in a building on Columbia’s campus, and we were lucky (blessed, fortunate, whatever you say) to be one of the families who didn’t lose anyone in the attacks.
But I have this visual memory of standing in my parents’ grassy back yard and staring up at the sky, which is impossibly large in the Midwest—no mountains to shorten the panorama of the blue dome—and telling the 10 year old neighbor boy that he should remember what this looked like, the empty sky. He asked me why, and I explained that he’d probably never again in his lifetime see this patch of sky, where planes from Chicago crossed paths with those from Milwaukee, without a single airplane or vapor trail in it.
Or so we can hope.
Our thoughts are with the loved ones of the victims and survivors of the 9/11 attacks.
Also watch a collection of international news footage of the events of 9/11 on The Good Feed Blog
Image of sparse clouds in blue sky courtesy of Shutterstock
I was at work and my immediate reaction was “Oh crap, and we’ve got a brainless monkey in the White House. We’re going to war, aren’t we?”
Little did I know I was being too optimistic; we not only went to war, we attacked the wrong target!
I remember finding out that the WTC was on fire. Working in an office within viewing distance of the Intercontinental Airport in Houston; I spoke to one of my managers about the horror. The conference room had a TV on and the company employees were allowed to check in on what was happening. It was a numbing attitude that effected our normal daily lives. The office was eerily quiet; and with the airport just miles away; a normal day would be filled with sounds of air traffic buzzing the building constantly. What should have been a beautiful peaceful sound was… Read more »
The day started out as just an ordinary day. I had gotten my husband off to work, and our sons off to school and was settling in to watch a documentary that was either just coming on or I had taped the night before, and the phone rang. It was my husband, and he told me a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. I turned on a morning news show just in time to watch the second plane hit the second tower. It was complete chaos. A plane hit (or had hit) the Pentagon, and another crashed in… Read more »
My girlfriend, who I was breaking up with, got up before me, knew before me, but said nothing and only threw a ping-pong ball at me before leaving for work. Then my sister called, “Turn on the television,” she said. My nine year old daughter came out of her bedroom and I said, “Our nation’s been attacked, get ready for school.” My partner and I had a house to paint high in the Portland hills that day. It was a crystalline day on the west coast too, and the sky looked exactly like the sky at the top of this… Read more »
i made a slideshow for Ani Difranco’s WTC Poem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLxlW-na5FA
“I head back home and on the way, withdraw cash at from the bank, fill up my tank, and buy 1,000 rounds of rifle ammunition and a dark gray suit. I tell the poor kid at the gas station, that day, that the Bill of Rights is going to take a beating”
http://standup2p.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/9-11-i-had-a-camera-that-day/
Oops broken link
http://standup2p.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/9-11-i-had-a-camera-that-day/
My 9/11 There have been so many tribute pictures posted today in remembrance of this awful day 11 years ago. I too, have vivid memories of that day. I was sleeping and was awaken to the front door busting open and Johnathan’s dad yelling hysterically that planes hit the World Trade Center. I didn’t know what the World Trade Center was or even where it was located. I was 20 years old. Johnathan was my only child at the time. I looked over at him still sleeping peacefully on the bed. I frantically snatched him up and ran out the… Read more »
I will never forget 9/11 because it was the birthday of my adoptive mom. I woke-up happy planning to celebrate her birthday by going to church and offer a candle as her memorial for the repose of her soul. My plan was to go to church then buy a cake to share with my family so as to celebrate her memory. As I always listen to news so I turned the TV on and lo and behold what was showing was the plane hitting the first tower then another plane hitting the second tower. I was shocked and became weak… Read more »
I was at my first day back at work following a collapsed lung and emergency medical treatment 7 days before. I was in a lot of pain and couldn’t really do the job (waitressing) so was mainly hanging around on limited duties. Some time after lunch people began to come in and tell us a plane had hit the world trade centre. I had never heard of the WTC. I was not really sure how this was a much bigger deal than any other plane crash. As the other staff nipped to the shop next door to watch their television… Read more »
I was in my final year of university in Toronto and we had this old TV that used to turn off on its own at least every hour or so. There was no remote, so we kept a poking stick behind the couch so we could turn the TV back on without getting up. My girlfriend phoned me and told me to put the TV on, and I woke my roommates up. We watched the second tower get hit and thought we were watching a replay of the first collision before we realized what was happening. We watched from the… Read more »
I just need to leave this here: http://nielsenhayden.com/110.html
I was working that morning in downtown Boston and covering the front desk for an absent coworker. I remember the confusion, the horror and how a lot of the skyscrapers in the area had been evacuated for fear that it would be happening again.
My sister called to wake me up that morning after both towers had already collapsed, and I remember initially thinking she must be confused because when I turned on the tv to catch up, the first images I saw were of the towers burning but still standing. Many, many people suffered a lot more on that day than I did, but my personal painful twist was that it happened shortly after I had separated from my first wife and moved into an apartment alone, so I didn’t really have anyone to go through it with in person. Most of my… Read more »