9/11 – A Day Etched in Memory

I had been on the job barely five months when that fateful Tuesday morning hit three years ago.

I’m the first to admit I’m not a morning person. Mornings in my opinion are for one thing—sleep. As I normally do in the morning, I made a clumsy walk to the kitchen that day to get something to drink. On his way out the door, my roommate asked me if I had been watching television. No, focusing on being coherent is usually my first task in the morning. He said I should check out what was going on.

At that time (about 6:30 a.m. Pacific) I made my way back to my bedroom and turned on the television. It didn’t matter which news channel you had on, they all were reporting the same thing—terror and destruction on the East Coast.

After slowly putting things together in my mind, I remembered that my parents were suppose to be flying from Pennsylvania to Texas to see family that morning. Of course when I called their house, there was no answer.

As I drove down the freeway on my way to the office in San Diego, I kept wondering where their flight might be. As I got to the office, my co-workers were following the news on both the Internet and by radio. It was then I learned a United Airlines flight had crashed in a remote area of Pennsylvania.

It is at that point that the mind goes in several different directions. While trying to get the news out to our readers as quickly and accurately as possible, I was also calling United Airlines just about every five minutes to get flight information on planes that had left Pennsylvania that morning, not knowing at the time that the United flight that crashed had originated in Newark and was scheduled to fly to San Francisco.

It was later that morning I learned that my parents’ flight had never taken off. They made it to the airport, but their flight, like those of many others, never got off the ground after being terminated by the FAA. Flights that had not yet taken off were grounded, while flights in the air were asked to land at the nearest airport.

I can still see that day in the office here and the events that took place just like it was yesterday. They say each generation has an experience in their lives where they know exactly where they were, what they were doing, etc.

As we look at the three-year anniversary of 9/11 in this issue, needless to say, Sept. 11, 2001 is a day we will all never forget, and that is the way it should be.