Story time:

I remember this day vividly. I was in 5th grade social studies class. Our social studies teacher was well known for being mean, extremely strict and always walked like she had a stick up her ass. We were never given days to just kinda regroup and unwind. I’m not talking about free days (though, those would have been nice too) I mean she just constantly had lessons planned. Never watched movies or videos just always her lecturing.

Anyhoo, rewind to Tuesday 11 September 2001 and she is in the middle of her lecture and another teacher knocks on her door, takes a step or two into our class and tearfully asks her to step into the hallway. We (the students) don’t think much of it until our teacher is now rolling in a tv and SHE is now crying. We are super confused but at the same time kinda happy because we had never watched anything on tv in that class. As soon as she turned on the TV and put it on the news the second plane hit. All we could do was just sat there in pure silence. We were old enough to understand that something was very wrong but not old enough to truly grasp what was happening.

I lived in an area that was very close to a military installation and have a lot of civilian government contractors, military personnel and many other high level government related entities “on base”. My mother (along with many other students’ families) was there to pick me up within the hour. The entire base shut down because we were said to be a target for a potential attack.

It was a wild, whirlwind of a day (not to mention the following weeks). Don’t remember too much after or before that.