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I’ve heard people reflect on where they were when JFK got shot, when Princess Di died, when the Edmund Fitzgerald sank…
I’m a millennial. I remember the day the towers fell.
In 2001, I was a student at Melvin H. Kreps Middle School in East Windsor, New Jersey.
Mid-morning on Sept. 11, my classmates and I filed into our sixth-grade English class and took our seats to find our teacher in a state of distress. She was tearful, struggling to speak, and we were trying to find out what was going on.
She managed to choke out something about the Twin Towers and a plane.
I had no idea what she was getting at, but I vividly remember a boy in my class saying, “Did it go like this?” as he crashed his hands together and made an explosion noise.
The teacher nodded, choked on a sob, and buried her face in her hands.
I don’t know how she found out. A phone call from someone watching the news? Smartphones didn’t exist. Was there a computer with internet in her classroom?
In retrospect, that had to be awful for her -- a teacher in New Jersey, knowing something dreadful, battling with how to break the news of terrorism to 11-year-olds while knowing that some students’ parents worked in New York.
Later that afternoon, at home, the TV was on. We were not a big TV-watching household, but I remember the scenes playing over and over on the screen that day. The buildings burning, falling, people jumping out windows to their deaths. Clips replayed for hours.
When my little brother got home from school -- he was in second grade -- I remember my mother sitting him down at the kitchen table and asking him what his teacher had told him.
“Bad guys crashed a plane,” Riley reported.
I don’t recall exactly what my mother said, but I know she explained some more facets to him.
That evening, as I rode bikes around the block with neighbor kids, one person pointed out that the date was the same as the emergency phone number: 9-1-1. Another kid said that this was the start of World War Three.
I personally didn’t know anyone who was killed that day. I heard that my neighbor was on the subway and felt it shake. Later, I would meet someone who is now one of my best friends and learn he was a paramedic at Ground Zero on that terrible day.
For what seemed like years after the attacks, the site remained a pile of rubble. I remember visiting Manhattan at some point afterwards and seeing a fence around the wreckage that used to be the World Trade Center.
I was in college in Michigan by the time the memorial opened.
“Never forget” was the saying echoed in reference to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 as Americans swore to mourn the dark day, honor the thousands who died, beware of enemies, thank the first responders, praise the passengers who fought back on Flight 93.
It’s hard to believe it’s been a quarter of a century, but we certainly haven’t forgotten.