story10680.xml

story10680.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2004-07-05

I was a senior in high school. I got up that morning, as I had every morning, without any idea that something had happened. I got dressed for school, watching SportsCenter on ESPN. There was nothing about the attacks on ESPN, so I had no idea that anything was wrong. I went to school that morning, listening to a CD in my truck. Once again, I had no idea that anything was wrong. I was sitting in my first period class, when my teacher came running into the room, mumbling something about the World Trade Center and a plane crash. She was hard to understand, but she turned the radio on in the class. That was the first time all day that I had heard anything about the attacks. Then, everyone thought that the crash was just an accident. My teacher was in charge of taking pictures for the yearbook in my school's lunch room, so our class went into the lunch room for the rest of the period. Not 10 minutes after we got into the lunch room, another teacher came running into the room screaming "Another plane has just crashed into tower 2 of the World Trade Center. We are under attack." That is when I realized that our country would never be the same again. All day long, my teachers tried to give us work to do but no work was ever done. Every classroom was clued to a tv or a radio. That afternoon, all planes were grounded. Normally, a few planes flew over our practice football field. On that day no planes flew over, giving off a very strange and odd silence. One small plane flew over our field and within a few minutes, U.S. Air Force Jet planes were escorting the small plane back to the ground. I got home that afternoon and was told by my dad to go and fill my truck up with gas, seeing as how no one had a clue as to exactly what was going to happen. All the way to the gas station, I kept looking into the sky scared to death and wondering if we would see anything like that again. At the gas station, I spent 45 minutes trying to get to a gas pump. Within those 45 minutes, the gas prices went from 1.59 a gallon to 2.10 a gallon. It was the most absurb thing I've ever seen. Thank God a cop was there and forced the station owner to bring the prices back down. All day long I felt that everything that had happened was just a big horrible dream and that I was going to wake up. Sometimes now, I still wonder if it all is just a dream and that I will wake up to find that September 11th never took place. All I can say now is "God Bless America."