Vote it up

My best girl friends from high school and I are planning a trip for after they graduate this year

SO....

Vegas or Puerto Rico for a week?
what do you think?

Until Next Time,
Avery

A moment captured in time

There is a picture from one of my trips that has always haunted me. Of course right now it is at my parents place in one of our many photo albums, but it has always been there in the back of my mind especially on today's date.


Nine years and three months ago in June 2001, a moment was captured on film on our grand East Coast Tour (18 states in 17 days) that I will never forget:

My sisters and I standing on a walkway in front of the New York skyline.

The World Trade Center is behind us.

Three months later on Tuesday Sept. 11, 2001 I was in--of all places--Mr. Miller's 7th grade U.S. history class waiting for a fellow student to get back from the cafeteria with a news question. All of a sudden that student burst into the room and said "The World Trade Center is on fire!"


The classroom television was immediately turned on, and Mr. Miller left the room to alert the rest of the staff. He came back shortly.


We watched the replay of the plane hitting the tower, over, and over, and over again, and just as we were getting the information that we needed more breaking news came on: The Pentagon had been hit. There were kids crying because they had uncles and aunts in those towers and at the Pentagon on the east coast. Cell phones were taken out of backpacks, lines were formed at the phones in the classrooms, and I noticed that throughout the day some students didn't come to class because their parents had picked them up.

I just sat there immovable as a stone. It was like a bad horror movie, it was so surreal that I didn't even believe that it could be happening. My family and I had just been there. We had stayed with friends all over the East Coast.

My thoughts flashed through the list,
Where did they work?
Were they okay?
Did my dad's friend, Dave Peterson, who was stationed in Baltimore work at the Pentagon? He only lived a half-hour drive away.
Was my friend Elizabeth Kaplan in Pennsylvania alright?
Did I know anyone who was flying that day?
What was going on in DC?
Would the statue of liberty be next? I had been up to the crown when we were there.

Then I thought of the people we had met in New York: the nice lady on the subway; the taxi cab driver that drove really fast through Times Square that one night; were they safe? Did they have friends or family in the towers?

Then I prayed. I prayed that Dave was safe at home with Colby and Janine. I prayed that the lady and the cabbie would escape the day unscathed. I prayed that the firefighters and the policemen would get everyone they could out of those towers safely. I prayed that one of the girls in my class, whose dad worked in the towers, would call her tonight when she got home from school.

In second period there were no televisions on except for in Mr. Miller's room. I think he might have defied the administration. We heard all of our information from those classes. We didn't do anything in our classes. It would've been too hard to concentrate. We were given pens, pencils, notebooks, talked and were told to do what we wished. I think it was all that the teachers knew to do. I can still remember the silence of the classrooms that day, so palpable with uncertainty that just sitting in it made you scared.

The announcement came over the intercom at 11:00am that the towers had collapsed.
My heart dropped to my feet as my thoughts flashed to the people of New York who had made a family from Minnesota feel so welcome in their amazing city.

I didn't find out about the crash in Pennsylvania until I got home that afternoon and hugged my mom. Everyone we had visited was present and accounted for. Thank god.

We were some of the lucky ones. I never found out if the girl's dad had called her that night; I was too scared to ask. I still wonder sometimes what happened to the lady from the subway and the cabbie.

That day was the day my generation grew up. It was our Pearl Harbor, our Kennedy Assassination, and our Challenger explosion, all rolled into one. Everyone I talk to knows where they were, who they were with, and what they were thinking on that day. The change in our world changed us. Some people grew less friendly, some people who were so outspoken clammed up, some people who had been quiet became more vocal, and some people, like me, found our calling.

I remember sitting and watching Peter Jennings constantly for the next week. He was trying to help everyone, as well as himself, make sense of this horrible tragedy. That's when I knew that I wanted to help people make sense of the senseless, inform people of things they needed to know, and tell the stories of those that are affected by their life experiences. I wanted to be a journalist, and one day I will be.

In the mean time, and today especially, I will always hold 9/11 in my heart. As I've learned over the past year, it's not just the places you go, but it's the experiences you have that shape who you are. They run the gamut of horribly awful to amazing it's how you react to them which shapes yourself.