Perhaps the strangest thing about my memories of 9/11 is how vividly I remember the day before. It was a rainy, windy day, and it was a busy one. I took the GREs, visited my brother at his music shop, then worked on returns at the Borders where I worked for over 7 hours. Back home, I read a book until 3:45 in the morning.
About 8:55 am, the phone rang. I heard someone dictating a message, and tried to ignore it, but the answering machine had this annoying beep-beep-beep tone whenever it received a new message. So, I got up and hit the play button, and it was my mother. "Diane, pick up. If you're there, pick up. A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center..."
When I heard that, I ran to the TV set, with a remote in one hand and the phone in the other. I called my mom, and the first thing she said was, "Thank God!" I sometimes commuted into the city with my freelancing, and she was concerned that I would have a hard time getting home. (People did wind up waiting hours for trains at Penn Station.)
I watched TV nonstop that day. I watched the first report of the plane hitting the Pentagon, and saw the South Tower collapsing live on TV. I was so frightened and felt so alone...it felt like we were under attack and the world was going to end.
I live about 40 miles away from Manhattan, and I could smell the fires at the WTC site from my home.
And Iris' post reminds me that my brother-in-law was in Atlanta on a business trip at the time, and he and his colleagues had to rent a car to drive back home to New Jersey because the planes were grounded. A cousin of his lost her fireman husband that day, and their baby was born after he died.