Firefighters run in while everyone else runs out.

Police officers move cautiously forward as everyone else ducks and screams.

The World Trade Center terrorist attack claimed the lives of thousands of people. Of the dead, 343 of these were firefighters, 23 were police officers. Each of these men and women moved forward into the towers and up the stairs to ensure the safety of as many people as possible. They guided civilians to safety in one tower as another tower was rammed by a passenger jet plane.

Two years ago, I was driving Justin to school and listening to Howard Stern. He got on a kick about something I didn’t want Justin to hear, and I changed stations. The station that usually plays Top 40 was carrying live feed from CNN. Just as I drove past my high school I heard the news. It didn’t seem real. It sounded like a sick joke. A “War of the Worlds” type of joke.

Nearly every other radio station was carrying live news feed. I called my parents and woke them up. I told them to turn on the television and called my friend Kevin. He told me he was watching it on television, but his office phone was ringing off the hook and he couldn’t talk.

I turned to Justin and told him that airplanes hit a building in New York. Being six, he was unphased by the news. I dropped him off at school and headed to an appointment with Doug.

It was a highway out of time. Out of sync. Highway 40, a massive interstate that cuts through the center of St. Louis County and City, was usually clear with cars flying by at breakneck speeds. This day, the maximum speed was about 40mph. There was no accident, no construction. Just a highway full of people sitting in their cars in shock, listening to the radio and driving on autopilot.

No one honked, and no one sped past. I had to shake my head to clear it of the disbelief and fog that it contained. The more news I heard, the more shocked I became.

New York City and St. Louis are nearly 900 miles apart, but it could be 9,000 for all I know of it. I was only there once, overnight, when my plane from London arrived two hours late and we missed the connecting flight. The next day I spent sixteen hours cooped up in LaGuardia Airport as our flights were delayed and/or cancelled. This is the entirety of my knowledge of New York City.

The World Trade Towers were bombed around the time I got married. This is the only thing I knew about them. They were big, and they’d been bombed. I’d no idea they were the two huge towers that stand out on the NYC skyline. I’d no idea what they contained, or why anyone would want to bomb them in 1993.

After my appointment with Doug, I went home and called Jen in Australia. It was the middle of the night for her, and she was actually spending the night at a friend’s. Her roommate said they’d been watching the television coverage of it until they went to bed. How awful, she said.

On CNN, the video of the second plane hitting the tower played over and over. There was no reality to it. It had to be a movie, created by in the sick mind of some Hollywood screenwriter and acted out by the highly overpaid and pointless superstars of our time. It was a special effect, created by talented computer graphics people in the darkened rooms of some studio in California. It wasn’t real.

Both towers had collapsed by the time I’d reached my house. Reports were coming in that people had been jumping from the upper stories of the towers to their deaths below. At first I was shocked, wondering what they could have been thinking. Later I would realize that the people on floors 90+ of the towers knew they had two choices - burn to death as the heat grew and grew and there was nowhere to go, or chose for themselves their own time and method of death.

A year later, on the first anniversary, I watched the two hour documentary filmed by two French brothers who had been following the activity of a fire house for months before the attack. They were one of the first ladders at the scene, and during the documentary you can hear the bodies hitting the ground with a resounding WHUMP. Over and over and over you can hear WHUMP. WHUMP. WHUMP. It was a sickening but distinctive sound, rather like the sound of an automobile accident. It was a sound you never want to hear, but will never forget.

Lunch on September 11, 2001 was spent with five of my colleagues, where we each angled for a better view of the televisions in the bar and wondered what the hell would happen next. Trading had been halted prior to the bell, and would not open again for six days. Lunch was uneasy as a whole, with each of us cracking jokes while wondering to ourselves what this would do to our jobs.

The rest of the day is a blur. All I really remember about the next two days is that Hazelwood was silent. I live just over a mile from the airport. Some days the air traffic is so bad that conversation must stop and restart if I’m on the phone on the deck. I knew that before I purchased the home, and didn’t mind. I’ve lived near the airport all my life.

September 12th and 13th were eerily silent. Even the crickets had stopped chirping. It was a constant reminder of the chaos in New York. Firefighters and police sifting through rubble, guarding their dead, finding hands and feet and fingers and heads as they tore at rock with their hands.

The American flag flew at half-mast for so long I thought I’d lose my mind. En route to work I always see a huge flag, and I’m proud to watch it wave in the breeze, as if saluting me on my drive. But with a combination of the flag at half-mast, and the breeze being non-existent, the flag that represents my proud country looked sagged and defeated.

This is not the way I wanted to see our country. We were not and are not sad and defeated. Nearly three thousand lives were lost, and the response to the tragedy was overwhelming. Police and firefighters from as far away as California were driving their way across the country to help New York City take care of its own. Blood banks were full and lines were out the door. Fund raisers were in effect everywhere, and people were actually getting off their apathetic butts and giving. We are Americans, and we will take care of our own. It’s just unfortunate that it takes such a tragedy to get us to that point.

Although we selfish, self-centered human beings are short-sighted in the best of times, rest assured we will never, ever forget the events of September 11, 2001. The stories will live on in our hearts forever.

Helping to remember,

michelle