Living through history - where were you on 9/11?

Every generation has at least one or two moments in their lifetime that they can point to and say "I remember that happening." For my parents, it was events like the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the NASA moon landing; for my grandparents, it was the Pearl Harbor attacks and the Great Depression. Up until 15 years ago, would have told you that the historical events I remember living through the most vividly were the Challenger explosion and the Berlin Wall coming down.

Of course, that all changed on September 11, 2001.

It's funny how memory works. Some people are blessed (or cursed) with eidetic memory - not me. There are whole swathes of years that are a blur. My childhood is mostly remembered through photographs; my high school and college days more like a highlight reel of all the hits and misses. Yet somehow I have sharp memories of the day of the 9/11 attacks.

I had graduated in December of 2000 with my Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing. After a couple of weeks back home, I was "encouraged" by my parents to get a job, so I went out and did what any good English major does in a similar situation - found a job at a bookstore.

I was still working there by September. Rolled out of bed as I usually did every morning, showered hastily, shoved something to eat down my gullet, and blearily got into the car to drive to work. Being a native New Yorker, I usually listened to Howard Stern in the mornings (this was before he moved to satellite radio). It was a short commute - maybe around 15 minutes - so I didn't get to hear much, but what I did hear didn't make much sense to me. Howard was going on about some sort of explosion or attack, but I honestly thought he was doing some goofy War of the Worlds bit so I was only half-listening.

It was only until I walked through the front doors that I knew something was wrong. Two of my co-workers were at the front counter, huddled around a portable radio. They were both white as ghosts.

"What the hell's going on?" I asked.

"You mean you haven't heard?" one of them said to me. I shook my head, confused. "The Pentagon and the Twin Towers were attacked."

A little background: the store (and my home) were in Huntington, a suburban town on Long Island that was not far from New York City. It's a major commuter hub, with a direct train line to Penn Station. With me and the rest of my friends growing up there, at the time all young kids all in our twenties, the City was where we all went on the weekends when we got tired of the same half a dozen local bars. Sure, we didn't live there, but it was our home away from home, the biggest, brightest, most cosmopolitan center of culture and life for our entire lives - and now it was under attack. It was terrifying.

It was around 10 minutes before 10 AM at this point. I dropped my stuff off in the back, clocked in (like hell I was getting yelled at for being "late"), and ran back up front. I got back just in time to hear the news: the South Tower had just collapsed.

I panicked. My uncle lives in Brooklyn, but I knew he had plans to visit downtown today. I tried calling my parents, but I couldn't get through. As I was hitting speed-dial on one of the store phones, the receiver pressed up to one ear and listening to the radio with my other, the news came through that the North Tower had fallen as well.

Finally, I got through to my parents. My mother told me that my uncle had decided at the last minute not to go into Manhattan today. I felt relieved, but only until I began to think about everyone that hadn't stayed home that day.

The store stayed open that day, even though hardly anyone came in. The stacks were deserted; we all did our jobs in a complete daze. We didn't have any televisions in the place, and this was well before the advent of the smartphone, so nobody could get any information anywhere that wasn't from the radio. Conflicting reports came rolling in; nobody knew anything about what had happened, who had been behind the attacks, what their motivations were - nothing. Speculation and fear, all day. It permeated our very souls.

After that, much of my memory gets blurry again. We eventually settled into an uneasy status quo of shock, numbness, and disbelief. It wasn't until I got a chance to visit Ground Zero in September of 2003 that it really sank home.

I saw it at night. I had gone along with some friends to the Feast of San Gennaro. Little Italy is in Lower Manhattan, so it was a short walk downtown. The farther we got from the celebrations, the quieter it became. Finally we saw it - or the lack of it, to be precise. Just... emptiness. To my left, there was a church; its stain-glass windows were riddled with cracks behind a scaffold. A giant expanse of chain-link fence was directly ahead, and beyond it was a massive open pit, still as a cemetery at midnight.

I'm not really religious in any way. For the most part I reject magical thinking and superstition, but the air that night was filled with this funereal energy, charged with anger, confusion, sadness, pain, and despair. It was overwhelming. I just stood there, clinging to the fence, for what felt like hours. It's something I'll never forget.

Where were you on 9/11? Do you have a personal connection to the events, or did you just hear about them secondhand? Share your stories here.

all images from National Geographic