I was working in the IT department for a tissue bank in Virginia. That morning I was teaching a computer basics class to the new employees for their orientation. We had just taken a break. A TV had been set up in the lobby of the building, and people gathered around it watching the smoke billow from the first tower. As we watched, the second plane struck. We were all dumbfounded, and honestly, I don't remember much else from that day.
When you're processing human tissues for transplant, you can't stop. Tissue has a very short window before it has to be placed in cryogenic storage - less than 24 hours. All the planes were grounded after the attack, but tissues banks all over the country had materials that had to reach a processing facility quickly. A father and his daughter from Ohio gathered the unprocessed tissues from their bank and drove nearly non-stop from Ohio to Virginia, picking up other samples along the way from recovery centers in Kentucky and West Virginia. When, exhausted, they pulled into our parking lot, they were greeted by nearly 200 of our employees cheering and waving American flags.
Nine months later, I found myself in New York for MacWorld. I was there the previous year, before 9/11, but stayed at Javits the entire time, feeling that sightseeing would be irresponsible since my company was paying for everything. The next year though, summer 2002, I decided that seeing the city, the memorials... ground zero... was worth missing a day of MacWorld. This time, it would irresponsible for me NOT to tour the city. I visited the crater, I saw the debris, I took pictures of children's art depicting 9/11 (I didn't realize it was a school until a police officer asked me to move along - apparently big hairy guys with cameras outside an elementary school make people nervous - who knew?) Seeing it on tv was powerful, but standing at the edge of the crater, seeing the cranes still digging through debris, seeing the thousands of cards, letters, pictures and memorials left on the gate at St. Paul's Chapel, I was overwhelmed.
My mother used to tell me how she could remember every detail about where she was the day JFK was killed. I remember from my own childhood watching the Challenger explode. This is another one of those events - the kind that stays with you forever, changing you, shaping you. It's one of those events we'll tell our children about, one that they'll look back at when they have their own life altering event.
