Your eyes and your brain see and process the images, but your heart simply refuses to accept them as true…they CANNOT be true. When the towers fell, it reminded me of scenes in a lot of disaster movies…the billowing clouds of smoke, the people running…but those were movies, and this was horribly real.

I watched for hours, late into the nights, waiting for the rescue of the hundreds (please, God, thousands!) of people they’d surely find in a protected area, an air pocket, a subway tunnel. Instead, days passed and hope faded. Heartbreaking images of people with homemade signs with photos and descriptions of their loved ones. Exhausted rescue workers and their dogs, all covered with that awful layer of dust. Images of people far away, on another continent, cheering as news of the death and destruction was announced.

I’ll never understand HOW it happened. I’ll never understand WHY it happened. All I know is..it DID happen, and my world will never be the same.

On Sept. 11 in 2001, I was on my way to the park for a morning walk. I never, ever turn on the radio but my husband had left it on in my car and for some reason I didn’t immediately turn it off (I hate radio chatter). They were talking about a “small plane” that had hit one of the Twin Towers, really being kind of silly about how it was like when Bugs Bunny hits something and the outline of Bugs and the plane is left behind, when news came in that a second plane had hit and both planes were large passenger planes. The tone changed completely — no more jokes, it looked like an attack on the US. I thought, “No, that can’t be right.” I flashed my card at the park ranger, turned around and drove back home, where I was glued to the TV for hours.

It was the Pentagon attack that nearly did me in. My husband was supposed to have been in the Pentagon, but there was a last-minute change of plans and he missed the meeting. When I saw photos of the Pentagon, I called hubby and even my unflappable husband was distressed. He had friends who had gone in his place. They work with the Department of the Army and that was the side that was hit (they were okay, although they would have been in that wing — a bad prostrate and a missed train saved them). Then, I heard that one of the planes flew out of Newark, NJ and I was worried about my friend M, so I called him and got voice mail. As it turned out, he’d gotten on a plane in Newark, but it was not the doomed plane (although he did get stuck in Atlanta and had quite a miserable drive home — and his boss was on the other Newark flight and killed). You’re right; it was one of those days that stick in your mind, forever. I remember exactly where I was when the Challenger space shuttle blew up, also.

I was sleeping when the attacks began. It was 2:48 in the morning here in Hawaii. A friend called me about 5:30 and woke me up. I was glued to the TV until I had to leave for work. I am a preschool teacher. My students gave me the tiny respite of normalcy on that day. We also heard the fighter jets flying over head for a few hours in the morning since there were commercial jet planes still headed our way from Asia (they took off after the attacks). Once they all landed safely, the fighter jets stopped flying.