my memory of september 11th

in the fall of 2001, i was just beginning my fourth year at unc, living in a single room in spencer dorm.

on september 11, i was sleeping in. the alarm wasn’t playing music when it went off. people on the radio were just talking.

before pressing the snooze button something about a plane crashing into a building seeped into my subconsious. i still have this mental image of a small biplane hitting a skyscraper.

i finally got up around 10, wrapped myself in a towel, grabbed my shower bucket, and headed down the hall to the bathrooms. but first i stopped at the room opposite mine. the door was open and one or two guys were watching tv. i remember seeing what was probably an aerial shot of manhattan cloaked in smoke.

i asked what was going on and they told me, in disbelief, that the news said the twin towers had collapsed. i continued down the hall and took my shower, figuring that can’t be right.

i have two memories from the rest of that day. the first is going to class, but there was no point in having any class. eventually it dissolved and we went to the big lecture hall in manning where a professor had decided to project cnn on a big overhead screen.

the second is back at the dorm, where i found friends watching the tv in alice’s room. they were just starting to broadcast the incredible amateur footage, and i remember viscerally experiencing the planes hitting the buildings over and over again and then the buildings collapsing over and over again.

3 Comments

enlightening to hear the way non-Northeast people our age first heard the story two and a half years ago. many of my peers were in the same situation: waking up in a dorm room, etc., except the majority in this corner of the US had well-connected local news with NYC ties, or our stations were plain old fucked from the wires being down…

enjoyed the correlation between you just seeing the movie and relating your intrinsic experience, Jud. nice post.

jason! dude! (fyi everyone else, this is not jason griffey)

i remember you having a blog but totally lost the url and google totally lets me down on a search of your first and last name.

melissa told me about you moving to albany a while ago, and i asked her to send me your new address, but she never responded. what’s the dealio? send me an email, let me know what’s up.

Since I was mentioned as living through this experience with you, I figured I would mention my biggest memory from that day. I remember very clearly walking down Franklin Street with you as they were putting out new editions of the newspaper for the day – this was around 2 or 3 p.m.(with the terrorist attacks as front page coverage). And then we walked into the Pit where there were televisions set out and I remember thinking about the footage of people huddled around televisions when JFK was assassinated and how we were truly living through an historic moment.

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