I was actually going to school in Manhattan back then, though it was more uptown (east of the Met). I was in second grade at the time, and I believe it was the second day of school -- my class was in the library, and the librarian got some sort of phone call from the room phone. Although it was such a while ago, of course it's still all too vivid -- the look on her face was the palest expression I've ever seen. We soon found out everybody had to evacuate the city (or at least most of the borough), and though most little kids would've been ecstatic to go home early, the problem was most of the kids...couldn't exactly go home. The teachers tried not to panic, but all us kids thought we were all going to die for sure... Apparently my mom said you heard the actual jet pass over the school itself it was that low. My mom was a teacher at school, so my brother and I were practically the last kids to leave, but my dad eventually picked us all up, along with my dad's cousin and his wife who were living in Manhattan at the time. The one thing I remember the most about that day though, was driving over the Triboro Bridge -- you could see all the way downtown, and there was this massive smoking, flaming mess; it felt like being in some sort of horrifying action movie it was that surreal. It's not something you want your seven year old to see, not anyone... Obviously the traffic was an apocalyptic nightmare, but when we got home back in Queens, I remember all the adults were crowded around the old console TV we used to have, and CNN was playing. All I saw from that was the clip of I guess the first plane crashing into the North Tower -- the show just played the clip over and over again, and I don't think we had the volume on. That's really all I can remember, I guess I got worried or bored after and went to go play... Being so young, I mean I knew something was wrong, but I wasn't exactly capable of understanding what was going on (at least the politics of it), or that history had just been made -- the picture from that same news broadcast is in my American History textbook this year, on the last page of the last chapter...
One of my mom's cousins actually worked in the Twin Towers himself too, I forget which tower though. It must have been the South one, because he said he could literally see the wing of the plane pass right across his view from the window. Luckily he made it out (though I think he got some pretty bad injuries) -- he was working on one of the lower stories, but it was still one nightmare of a jump, I can only imagine...
If only I knew what was to come when I was seven... the first repercussion of the attacks I remember was the addition of God Bless America in baseball games. Every single time the seventh inning rolls along and they sing that song, on a subconscious level, it's still a tiny bit unsettling personally. Not to mention how different New York is now because of what happened -- I mean New York's always New York
, but things are so much more restricted in relation to security now -- apparently I heard they even installed metal detectors in
public schools at one point shortly after 9-11, and of course all the insane measures the MTA, airports, and the whole lot use nowadays -- plus American national security, which is a whole other story. And of course none of this is even mentioning the diplomatic ruination it caused -- almost a decade later and we're still barely getting out of one of these dang wars. Makes me wonder... what a day...