Today...

I remember walking out of the bedroom and into the living room and seeing that second plane slice into that building. I cannot even remember if that was one of the multiple replays, I believe I watched that live on television. If not, it was within five minutes of it happening because it felt like an eternity before I watched that first building come straight down into the ground.

I was not really surprised because it had to happen sooner or later. Pearl Harbor wasn't the last, after all. I was stunned at the magnitude of it all.

Then the second building came down.

I turned to my Wife and asked her if she had filled out a money order for some bill we had coming due and when she said she had not, I told her we better go and cash it in. We did, we went outside and it was just such a beautiful sky. They had already started to shut the airspace down across the country, we did not know that yet. I believe we heard about the Pentagon being hit when we were in the car and that ratcheted up our own anxiety quite a bit as they could have flown over our apartment on the way to striking that target.

The news reports of that morning had us looking up, there were reports of three, then two and then...finally...one more plane unaccounted for as I recall. I wondered if they would shoot that one down, surely they had to be doing something along those lines.

We cashed the money order so we would have the extra money in case this was an extended, catastrophic incident. We went to the grocery store and purchased even more food and other necessities just in case but everything turned out all right for us. For a few thousand American Citizens, the day did not end well.

Here is to remembering them. No empty jingoism, no nothing else except remembrance and sadness for the loss.