story6424.xml

story6424.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-12

My day began with an early morning trip to a local discount store called Tuesday Morning. The doors opened at 8:00 a.m. and I wanted to be there to take advantage of the early morning sale. I finished shopping around 8:45 a.m. and got in my car to drive home. I usually have talk radio on in the morning, and the first thing I heard was a report that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. My immediate thought was that it was deliberate, but that it was some nut case with a grudge in a light plane. It was only a few minutes to my home, so I turned on the TV in the kitchen as soon as I walked in the door. There was a scene of unimaginable devastation on the screen, and I knew that it had to be something other than a small plane. I stood in the kitchen in front of my 13" TV when I had a large screen TV available only only a few feet away in the family room, but I was transfixed; unable to tear my eyes from the screen. As I stood there watching, there came the unbelievable sight of another plane crashing into the other tower, and I knew our world had changed forever. I called my son in Columbus to ask if he was watching, and we stayed on the phone together until the first tower fell. I then called my husband at his office and found that he and his staff had turned on the TV in the waiting room and were gathered around with his patients watching, and was on the phone with him when the second tower fell. No one knew why this had happened, only that it had to be deliberate. I then called my sister in Middletown, Ohio and she told me that she had just heard that these were commercial aircraft that had been hijacked, apparently for the express purpose of turning them into weapons - aircraft full of Americans being used to kill still more Americans. I was dumbfounded -who could hate us that much? And then came reports of the attack on the Pentagon, and then more reports of a plane crash in Pennsylvania, and I remember thinking - how could this happen? How could it be so easy to hijack so many planes? How many more are there in the air right now and where are they headed? I stood there in front of that little TV switching between stations, trying to understand what was happening to our country, and finally looked at a clock. It was 2:00 p.m. and I had been standing there for five hours.