I was 19 and in college. So many days have come and gone and I still remember so much of what I did that day. I went to breakfast in the cafeteria and the first plane had already hit the first tower. I thought "What an awful, terrible mistake. They are going to make somebody pay for that." I was thinking like a lawsuit. I was watching the TV when the second plane hit and I knew then it was no mistake. I went to my first class after that. By the time it was over, the remainder of classes that day and the next had been cancelled and a plane had flown into the Pentagon. I went back to my dorm room and tried to call my parents. Cell phones among college students were still pretty unusual then, I didn't have one. (There was also no Facebook, not for a few more years yet.) I spent the next few hours using a prepaid calling card to call every number I knew for every person I knew, over and over again, never getting through. My parents both worked for the federal government in Washington, D.C. I didn't really think anything had happened to them or anyone else I knew, but it was so frightening nonetheless. None of my calls went through. I went down to the empty basement in the dorm and cried. Finally I realized I had better head back to the cafeteria if I wanted to get any lunch. There I sat alone and a friend from high school approached me, said she'd spoken to her family, had I spoken to mine? I started bawling because I hadn't and she sat there and hugged me for a long time. To this day, we still send each other messages on this day to remember the connection and kindness she shared with me that day. When I got back to my room, I was able to talk with my sister, also at college away from home. She had finally reached our parents. One by one, friends and family returned my calls and emails. Everyone I knew was safe.
Entirely personal and by and large I was not personally affected by events that day, but still it looms very large in my memory all the same. After the fact, I lost a friend. He knew one of the pilots of one of the planes. He was devastated by the idea that the man could have finally found all the happiness he sought only to lose his life like that. The personal effect the attacks had on my friend, and the lack of personal effect on me, led us to conflict over our very different reactions and our friendship ended. He made many changes in his life after that, including moving to New York. So much did change. The opposite of my friend, I would later meet a woman who left NY, traumatized by the events of that day and unable to return. I did get a cell phone not long after that. My mother sat me down to have a talk about what I should do if something catastrophic should in fact happen in Washington. She told me not to try to come home, to go fetch my sister at school and drive to California, where they would meet us if they could. I think it changed people's thinking in subtle ways. I would say most people thought something like that could never happen, only because it never had. But it did.
God's hand was at work there.
