I remember 9/11 very well in terms of my personal experience. Everyone around my age does, I think. But I’ll tell you mine.
I woke up at 7 a.m., which was a little late. We had to be at school by 7:45, and I threw on some clothes, jumped into the car I’d only had for two months, picked up my neighbor Sarah, and started driving.
She told me something had happened. Her parents were saying something had happened. But it didn’t mean much to us, so we didn’t even turn on the radio. We just kept listening to awful 2001 music.
We got to the parking lot where the underclassmen had to park, about half a mile from school, and I realized I didn’t have any shoes. I’d run out of the house in my socks assuming there would be shoes somewhere in my car. There weren’t.
So I was like, “Oh shit, I guess we have to walk to school with me having no shoes,” and we started walking. Then a senior we knew pulled over and offered us a ride. She gave me her sandals and said the local radio station had been really confused about whatever was happening. We listened as the FM DJs rambled through AP wire reports.
In reality, both towers had already been hit, and the Pentagon was about to be.
We got to homeroom at 7:45 and everyone was looking at mobile news on their Nokia phones. You could basically just get headlines: two planes hit the towers. Then someone came in and said the Pentagon had also been hit.
At that point it was obvious to everyone that this was an attack.
We went to our first real class, which started more or less normally. A few minutes in, someone came in and said one of the towers had collapsed. The class just stopped. Everyone left and started milling around the school.
Soon we were herded into the theater for an all-school assembly. The headmaster said there had been an attack in New York, that school would continue, but that anyone who felt they needed to leave should feel free to do so.
Sarah and I immediately thought: We’re going to fail this chemistry test, so we should leave.
I went up to the chemistry teacher and said, “Sarah and I are leaving. I’m sorry we’ll miss the test.”
He said, “We aren’t doing any tests today. We’re going to walk down by the river and talk about our feelings.”
I said, “Oh. Okay.”
And we left anyway.
We drove to what I remember as McDonald’s, although Sarah insists it may have been a hot dog stand called Hot Dog Adventure. Then we went back to our neighborhood. I dropped her off and went home.
I went upstairs, sat in my room, and for the first time actually watched the cable news coverage and saw what had happened.
And I suddenly felt this awful sadness and guilt, because until that moment I hadn’t understood how serious it was. Why had I cared about the chemistry quiz? Why had I even been thinking about that?
Then my phone rang.
It was Sarah. She had apparently been having basically the same reaction.
“I want to go back to school,” she said.
I understood exactly what she meant. I picked her up, and we drove back, just to spend the next few hours with the rest of our class.
The last class of the day was math. The teacher told us Osama bin Laden was responsible. He had heard, through whatever means, that bin Laden had promised at a wedding a few months earlier that he was going to attack America, and now he had done it.
Then we went home.
I dropped Sarah off and went back to my house. I found out that my father was alive, which I had basically assumed because he lived on the Upper West Side. I also found out that my sister’s ex-boyfriend’s family was alive, which I hadn’t thought about at all, but they worked at the World Trade Center, so of course she had been terrified about them.
That evening Bush gave his speech.
Then my mother told Emily and me to take our cars, go fill them with gas, and from then on to always keep the tanks full, just in case something else happened.
And we did.
I was a junior in high school, sitting in Mr Johnson's first period physics class. A senior named Dave came in and announced that terrorists has crashed two planes into the towers and what we should turn on the tv.
Dave was a little more than halfway through his life at that point because he would die of an opioid overdose sixteen years later.
Anyway, these two defining catastrophes of the American 21st century are always linked in my memory.
A defining screen grab of history of the time and what was starting to go wrong with culture and society: after a terrorist attack, the very first thing to do was "walk down by the river and talk about our feelings.” Then insert the famous Norm Macdonald bit.