9/11: Reckoning

In honor of the tenth anniversary of September 11th, The New York Times has prepared a special report called The Reckoning: America and the World a Decade after 9/11. It’s a beautiful website with interactive features including a slideshow of the items that people saved and a map where readers can pinpoint where they were and what they felt.

It makes me remember: On September 11th, 2001, I was a seventh grader in girls’ school in Dallas, Texas. I was sitting in Mrs. Lafitte’s history class, where we were discussing trade embargoes: with Cuba and Iraq. Our French teacher, Mrs. Camp, burst into the classroom and interrupted Mrs. Lafitte to tell us that the Twin Towers were falling down. I can’t remember what happened during the rest of class, only that during our morning break the halls were chaos, girls frantically trying to figure out what had happened, to call their friends and relatives.

I found my best friend Taarini. She was in tears–her father was scheduled to fly across the country that day. Although school carried on as normal, Taarini’s mother came to take her home. Her father was safe, but the family was shaken up–Taarini’s uncle, a distinguished Seikh gentleman who wore a turban, faced endless jeers and insults in the weeks after the attack. For the following year, Taarini and her family always wore American flag pins.

The house I grew up in was not far from Love Field Airport, and our lives were punctuated by the sound of planes passing. Returning home that afternoon, I remember noting how quiet everything was–from the nearly-deserted highway to the empty blue sky overhead.

So tell us: where were you on September 11th? What did you save? And on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the attacks, what, for you, has changed?