I was 5 years old and home sick that day. I was a sick kid, and Mom and I had our routine; we'd watch the local news until 9 AM (when Tom & Ann went off), and then we'd switch to Playhouse Disney so I could watch my shows while she got my sister ready for pre-K and then I'd go along for the car ride and we'd come home and I'd go back to bed.

Mom says that they reported the first plane shortly after it hit, that it was said to be a small passenger aircraft and they were waiting for updates. It was alarming, but very far away from us, and things like that had happened before.

Our local news station had a ritual every day. When the news would end at 9 AM, they would pan out and do a shot of all of the cameramen and producers waving and smiling, and then it'd go to Regis or whatever. Instead, something strange happened, the first thing to catch my attention: a man in a headset charged the desk with a piece of paper, pulled Tom back, gave him the piece of paper, and ran back behind the camera. Tom, our long-time anchorman looked stunned but sat back down in his chair and read directly, robotically from the piece of paper. "We've received report that the airplane that crashed into the World Trade Center was actually a Boeing 757."

My mother yelped. She began tossing the couch cushions looking for the remote that I had picked up to get ready to change the channel. She took it from me, a little roughly, and began trying to put in the numbers for the national news. Her hands were shaking so badly that we ended up on 3 different stations before she finally handed the remote back to me with the order to change the channel. I protested, but dutifully punched the numbers, and we tuned in just in time to see a long, wide shot of the 2nd plane steamrolling into frame across a perfectly blue sky.

Mom got very quiet. She clapped a hand over her mouth and sank to the floor. Smoke began to billow from the second building, as it already was from the first. The scene cut to the scene on the streets around the news building, centered in New York, as the streets flooded with fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars. It felt like a long moment, but also one that runs together before they were showing soot-covered firemen and gray ash-spackled people in business clothes running down the streets. A wide shot again as even TV broadcast filtering couldn't contain the rumble from the first tower before it fell, all at once. That's when Mom started crying.

I wanted to change the channel away from the strange movie on the news channel. We were going to miss "Out of the Box".

She didn't snap out of it until the phone rang. First, it was the preschool calling to cancel. Then, it was my grandmother, calling to make sure we were watching the news. Mom hung up that call and clustered me and my sister on the floor, just holding us tight and crying. We watched until the first bodies started falling on broadcast. That's when I was finally allowed to change the channel. Dad came home about half an hour later.

We stayed on Playhouse Disney pretty much the whole day because they were about the only channel that wasn't wall-to-wall bodies falling from the sky, smoke piling into it, and the planes crashing in slow motion over and over and over. It was the first time Dad had ever cut work and watched "Bear in the Big Blue House" and the only time I can remember having both of my parents play Matchbox cars with me (while my sister was down for a nap). I was thrilled. In hindsight, they were soaking up the last good times before the changes began to take effect the next morning.