Where were you on 9/11?

I was at home in Moline, IL waiting to go to a doctors appointment. I turned on the TVm more or less to kill time, when I saw the first plane hit.

I was asleep because it was like 12 midnight here. But my then-boyfriend woke me up and told me to turn on my TV and watch CNN. I saw the attack over and over again. It was really like a nightmare. I stayed awake until like 3 am. That morning, it was all my officemates and I can talk about.

I was in Tampa, FL, staying at my daughter's house and preparing for a big move and a new job in Miami. (I left the next day). I walked out of the guest bedroom into the living room where the large-screen TV was showing the "Today" show. They said something about a plane hitting a skyscraper in NYC.

I thought it was some goofball pilot, flying a Cessna, who had made a wrong turn. I was soooo wrong. When the second plane hit (by this time I was glued to the TV screen), I knew there was something more ominous to this story.

I felt a numbness, as though somebody had poured a gallon of ice water over my head. How could this happen? We are a good country. Why are planes crashing into buildings in NYC, DC, and a field in Pennsylvania? Aren't we supposed to feel safe in the US?

Although I had spent 11 years in the Panama Canal Zone, when Panama had a dictator (Omar Torrijos), I thought when I returned to the US that I would be (relatively) safe. Now, as I watched the rescue efforts in the NYC buildings, (not knowing the whole story yet), I knew that I wasn't safe anymore.

Other countries in the world had experienced insane, unexpected violence. Now we joined the club. Our days of immunity were over.

9-11 was a day when all of us in the US thought and felt together. In ordinary times, we may be New Englanders, or Southerners, or Midwesterners, or Texans (you get the idea). But now we felt pain; we saw heroism in its truest sense as firefighters and police officers went back into the wrecked buildings to save more people, but losing their own lives in the process.

9-11 changed me. The naivete of national safety is over. We are living in a harsh, mean world where some people would like to kill us just because we live in the U.S. Does that make me live in terror or hate people I don't know? No but I don't take each day of life for granted.

I still go about my business in a large city and participate in the community. But my personal relationship with my God is even more significant---He is reliable for me who is living in an unreliable world.

I was getting ready for school, freshman year. I happen to turn on the tv and there it was, it had just happened. I called my brother who was about to head off to army boot camp and he turned on the tv. I went to school and they took everyone in to the assembly room where we prayed (christian school) and then found out the towers fell. I later on found out that a close friend of mine lost her mom.

I was teaching a class full of middle school kids. Today I was teaching a class of high school kids. In my class, we did observe a minute of silence at 8:46. When they did the announcements this morning, two males students sang a harmonized arrangement of the national anthem that they composed. It brought tears to my eyes. When I told the one who was my student that I had cried, he was truly speechless. Maybe there is still some hope for the future of our nation.

I was off work driving home from an early 8:00am morning Dr's appointment, and heard it on the car Radio, then raced home to turn on the TV and just sat there in shock. I just watched it unfold and sat there, could not move...

Jon in nashville