story7376.xml

story7376.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-14

The evening of September 10th, I was instructing a class at a local college. Many of the students became highly disgruntled and verbally disruptive, which culminated in my quitting that night. I was so angry and outraged, that I was afraid something terrible was going to happen if I stayed. As I drove home, I dreaded having to inform the dean, who had been very supportive in the past and who had commended me earlier on not giving up. Early the next morning of September 11th, I called her around 8:30 AM EDT (although I'm not too sure on the time). After I recounted the drama and trauma of that fateful evening in tears, it was close to 9:00 AM when our conversation ended. Feeling exhausted and a little depressed, I went into the livingroom to watch a little TV. The volume was low, and there was a scene on one of the local channels, like one from an old Godzilla movie, but more ...surreal. I remember thinking, "when did this channel start showing old movies this time of the morning?" Well, I wasn't in the mood for destructive shows, so I turned the channel to find the same scene on another local channel. I couldn't pick up the remote control fast enough. I remember thinking how odd it was for 2 channels to show the same scene, unless it was live and local. My mouth fell open when I changed the channel to find yet another local TV station with a similar scene. By this time, I'm almost sure it was about 9:10 AM EDT or so. My heart began to sink and I got that awful sick feeling in my gut. My first thought was that this scene was from downtown Orlando. Thoughts of my family possibly being involved sent a wake-up call. I turned the volume up very loud with the remote control in one hand, the telephone in the other. The anchor person was talking in mono syllables. As I stared at this scene more closely, I realized with a distant pan shot of the cameras, that this was New York!! And it was no movie, but was actually happening right in front of my eyes! I dropped both the remote and the phone, with my hands up to my face and screamed! Immediately I began strainging my ears to hear some assurance that this was some Hollywood stunt gone amuck or something. But what I did hear was that a plane had gone through one of the twin towers in New York. By the time I got to the couch, the second plane was striking the other twin tower. The anchorperson kept talking about how unreal this all seemed and about the structure of the building. I kept yelling to the TV, "What about the people!", as I watched the plane explode and what seemed like debris falling from the building. I understood that at that time of morning, lots of people had probably just arrived to work. My imagination went wild! I imagined people being blown out of windows, crushed by heavy building material, people burned in the explosion, body parts! The tears were streaming down my face. By 9:30 AM, I had earnestly prayed, and cried, for all those people, for their families and loved ones. My little life drama was miniature in comparison to the traumatic scale of what was happening to those people that day of September 11th, 2001.