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I was visiting an acquaintance, when a friend of hers called; I was signaled to turn the TV on-just in time to see the second plane hit live; the weird thing-the surreal thing-was that the UPS guy delivering a package just walked in her house to see the tv-and we all just stood there, watching.
I remember the sheer panic and pandemonium trying to get my kids out of school; how everything was closed in our town, how empty and quiet it was; and some fear-I live right by Fort Detrick in Maryland, and some news reports initially said that they believed that the flt. 93 plane was supposed to hit Detrick.
I remember trying to get a hold of my husband who was in DC that-he had stopped to make a couple of phone calls, and felt the impact of the pentagon being hit.
and mostly, I remember crying all day

I was a senior in high school. When I woke up my parents that morning by speaking wildly about planes and New York, they thought I was making some kind of Orwellian prank. I left the tv on in their room and bounded down the stairs to make a phone call. I was on the West Coast, but had just moved from Hawaii. I called a friend in the 808 so she could see it happening live (it was so early I knew she wasn't awake).

I watched the whole thing. I couldn't get through to my sister in Jersey or any of my NYC/DC friends for a while.

I didn't go to school that day. Instead, I tooled around with my dad, running his errands. Lumber yard. 7-11. Home Depot. I was in a daze, and kept musing about how it seemed like "business as usual," like nothing was extraordinary about that day.

Come to find out, none of my friends had stayed home from school because of the events. Some of them didn't even know about it before they got to school. Rumor had it that teachers offered disclaimers at the start of their classes about not talking about it during instruction- that upset students could speak with guidance counselors.

I remember feeling oddly desperate that so little seemed effected.