September 11th

[RosieTR]

I remember getting in the car after swimming with my master's group and hearing the snippets on the radio. I stopped to get some bagels for breakfast then went home and turned on the TV while I got ready for work, then rode my bike to work with headphones, the one and only time I've ever done that. Later I found out the captain of my high school swim team was killed in the attack. She would have been about 25 at the time. I sent her parents a card even though I hadn't really kept in touch with her since we graduated. My cousin had an appointment at the WTC for later that day but luckily well after the towers were hit so she just went home. Another cousin who is trained as a nurse went to Manhattan to do triage but there weren't many living victims. Somehow all my NYC relatives survived, and then my sister moved there for a couple of years. Go figure. DH has never seen Ground 0 nor NYC so we plan to visit in November on what will be the 4 year anniversary of his father's death.

[Tradd]

I was off work for a month, as I'd gotten laid off about two weeks before 9/11. I'd had an interview and was waiting on the results of drug tests and such. I'd fallen asleep with the local AM news/talk station on the evening before. I woke up about 15 minutes after the first plane hit. I remember wondering why Peter Jennings' voice was coming out of my radio. I listened for a minute and then ran into the closet to pull my TV out, where it had been put away for the summer.

I lived in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood at the time, very close to the lakefront, about 3 miles north of downtown. All we heard for some days were the fighter jets overhead. I had a friend who then worked for a federal gov't agency downtown. Her office closed early, and we had lunch together in a neighborhood hole in the wall, watching the TV.

[boss mare]

I had met for the first time ever DH 2 weeks earlier at a horse show He is a firefighter . We had just had our first date on the 9th of September... On 9-11 I got up and started my day as I always do : cleaning stalls and feed horses before I went to work with NPR on the radio.. The news was on and there was something about an airplane crashing into WTC .. I did think that much opf it... thought that was a Cessena or someother small plane... But it the talk continued... The I thought that there is more to it than than jsut a small plane... I went in to turn on the TV .... I had an old TV and sometimes it would work and someime it would not... I am not a TV person so replacing it was not a priority... It did come on that morning I saw the first tower I grabbed the phone to call my new friend ( he lived about 60 miles away) to tell him .. His voice mail came on just as the second plane hit .....
I finally got to talk to him... He was very upset... There is a huge huge brotherhood of all firefighters all over the world. I did not understand just how deep it was until I met DH He drove all the way over to my place that day because he did not want to be alone.. The next day although it was not his shift, he went to work, just to be with his Brothers
A very good movie that starred Robert De Neiro is called " The Guys"