9/11/01

Michael walked into the Seminary room late. The lesson had just begun, and we all kind of looked up wearily when he said, "A plane crashed into the World Trade Center. We were watching it on TV, that's why we're late."

When I heard that I thought he was talking about a small personal plane--not a big deal. When I got home at around 730, my dad called for me to come over to the TV in the family room. On the screen I saw huge plumes of smoke coming from one of the towers. We stared, fixed on the image of smoke pouring from the tallest building in New York. Minutes later, another plane slammed into the building--live on international TV. A stunned reporter at a loss for words filled the airwaves with silence. Our horror grew as the first one building, then another slowly peeled downward, tumbling tons of concrete a hundred stories down to the ground below. On another channel a fire raged in the ruins of a section of the Pentagon.

I was in 9th grade. It was one of those defining moments in history were everyone remembers where they were when it happened. How our world has changed since then. It used to be easy to travel. Now it's a pain.  We still live in the shadow of what happened, even 11 years after the event. Hard to imagine what our world would have been like without it.