I had just walked out of morning Mass, and saw our priest and another man standing outside looking up at the sky. There was a thick black and red layer, and the smell of smoke hit me right away. I asked Father what was going on, and he didn't know. Obviously there was a big fire close by. At that moment, DH called me from work on my cell, and told me I'd better get home right away, that a plane hit one of the Towers. I rushed home, and turned on the tv. And then panic struck me. I went over to my son's elementary school, where there were maybe 100 people already there to get their kids. The school handled things so quickly and orderly, it was amazing. People were crying. I gave the name of my child, as well as 5 neighborhood kids, whose parents called me right after the other, stuck in Manhattan, and begging me to get their kids out of school. And then my cell went dead. No one's phones would work.
The school aids brought the kids down to the lobby, and the kids were all confused. It was election day that day, and my son thought he was being taken out of school because of the public voting going on in his school cafeteria. When they saw the black cloud, they all got scared.
I threw them in the car, and rushed to my other son's high school. When I got close, there were fire engines closing off the streets for 2 blocks in all directions around the school area. I couldn't get near the school. A firefighter told me that all the kids were released and told to go home, or to go to a local church if their homes were close to ground zero. I drove the way my son would have walked if he were walking home, which is the same way the city bus would have gone if he were on it. I didn't see him, but when I got home, my neighbor was standing outside, and told me "he's home, he's home!" Thank God! Her DH had just gotten on his motorcycle to go get their daughter who went to school downtown, close to ground zero. It would have been impossible for him to get anywhere near the area with his car.
Then I saw something amazing and made my weep like crazy. People everywhere were hanging out American flags, from houses, apartment building windows, stores, just everywhere the flags came out.
There's so much that happened. I had to close my windows and doors, from the ash and smoke getting in. And then the ashy debris started falling, burnt papers on my front steps. I heard people screaming for their husbands who were fighting the fire, people who had family in the towers at that very moment. It was agony.
A few hours later, some on my neighbors who worked right there started coming home, no shoes on their feet, white with ash from head to toe, and all my one neighbor could say was "it's terrible". She had seen people jump to their deaths, people on fire.
My neighbor and friend David De Rubrio died in the Tower 2 when it fell. They never found his body.
An excrutiatingly sad thing to see was the first photo go up, then another, then another, every bare space of NYC wall became covered with photos put up by people seeking friends and family who hadn't been heard from. There's just so much. I can't say enough about our former mayor Rudy Giuliani who held us all together. One more thing I remember, an F-16 flying overhead, and my son saying "cool". He really didn't understand what all this meant, only that he knew it wasn't a usual thing to seean F-16 flying over NYC.
The next day, I went out, and picked up some ash off the street and put it in an envelope. The sky was still black, the fire still burning. There are so many people who just haven't healed from this yet, even many people in other states and maybe even other countries. It was like a nuclear bomb exploded on us.
Sorry this was so long.
. I will never forget as I drove to All Star Sports, I kept hearing the DJ say over and over that WDW should be shutting down and evacuating b/c it was probably next.
