Twenty years later, I can’t remember what I saw and what I think I saw. I remember listening to the news with my mom, Judah, and Mimi as the anchors casually mentioned that a small plane seemed to have hit a tower. We were on I-95 - or maybe the Garden State - headed south to visit Penn ahead of applications.
I looked out the window and could see some smoke. A tree broke my sightline. And then a flash of fire and a jet of smoke. Bigger than a small plane but what did I know? Also, the small plane had already hit, right?
There was still nothing on the news. Then maybe it was another small plane but something seemed wrong. And then the reports started that a big plane had hit? Or maybe two? And then we were on campus. Mostly, there was some confusion, but the day was on a crumbling routine. We checked in at the tour area. We didn’t have smartphones. There was no information. We started the tour, and soon we started to sense that hell had broken out 80 stories above lower Manhattan.
Walking into Hillel, the TV was on. The tower fell. The towers fell. My mother started to cry. My father had been there the day the van blew up. He’d left already. I was 7 then and didn’t know what it had meant.
No one knew what was going on, but the tour was over. We wandered for a short time and then got back in the car.
I-95 was empty. Not empty, just us and humvees, olive and tan trucks. It seemed that every armory in every county in all of New Jersey was empty and on the highway. Jets were overhead. Calls started going out and in to see who wouldn’t be coming home from work. Then we saw lower Manhattan. Or maybe we saw just a plume of smoke. We prayed, but didn’t cry. It was too shocking.
My sister lived, then, not close but maybe too close? She’d heard a jet accelerate overhead, she ran outside and saw another. My brother walked to his apartment. A friend’s father missed a meeting because a broken shoelace led to a missed bus led to a missed train meant he came home that night. A friend’s brother didn’t.
The tower of smoke was bigger than those of glass and steel. Much bigger. The flags tried to blow it away but couldn’t. It cleared itself over time.