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On the morning of September 11, 2001, my biggest problem was a permission slip.
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I was 12 years old and in Grade 7 at PS 89 in Tribeca, about a block from the World Trade Center. My class was supposed to go on a field trip to the Bronx Zoo that morning. When my humanities teacher, Mrs. Garvey, asked everyone to bring their signed permission slips to the front of the classroom, my stomach sank.
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I had forgotten to get my mother’s signature.
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I asked to be excused and went downstairs to the school office to call her. My mother, a single parent, worked for American Express at 3 World Financial Center, directly across from the World Trade Center.
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I asked her to come over and sign my permission slip. She said she would.
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What I didn’t know was that my mother had been heading toward the underground shopping complex beneath the World Trade Center to run an errand before work. My call brought her back toward my school. By the time she left, she decided to skip the errand and head directly to her office at American Express.
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On the way, she noticed an airplane flying alarmingly low over Lower Manhattan. She wondered whether a movie was being filmed.
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Then she watched it strike one of the Twin Towers.
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She initially thought she had witnessed some kind of movie stunt or a horrific accident. Then she saw a second plane strike the other tower and realized it wasn’t an accident.
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Inside my classroom, we didn’t know what had happened. I remember the room shaking and pencils falling from desks. I thought perhaps one of the custodians had dropped a heavy cleaning cart on the floor above us.
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Then we felt another violent shake.
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Our classroom windows faced Stuyvesant High School, so we couldn’t see the World Trade Center. Eventually an announcement came over the PA system. As I remember it, we were told there had been a “minor accident” at the World Trade Center. Teachers were instructed to take us downstairs to the cafeteria to be picked up by our parents.
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I didn’t go directly to the cafeteria.
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I was a curious 12-year-old who needed to know what was happening. I slipped away and took another staircase toward the schoolyard.
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What I saw outside has remained with me for 25 years.
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Manhattan had stopped moving.
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Growing up in New York, I had never seen anything like it. People were standing motionless on the sidewalk, staring upward. For a moment, my 12-year-old mind couldn’t make sense of what could cause an entire street of New Yorkers to stop at once. I remember wondering if there had been some kind of alien landing.
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Then I followed their eyes.
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I saw the World Trade Center burning.
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Smoke poured from the tower. Tiny objects appeared to be falling from high above. At that age, I assumed I was watching debris. Only later did I understand that some of what I saw may not have been debris at all.
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I returned to the cafeteria. One of my classmates was crying because she, too, had someone close to her who worked at the World Trade Center.
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I didn’t know where my mother was.
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There were no smartphones showing someone’s location on a map. I couldn’t text her and ask if she was safe. I could only wait.
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Eventually, she appeared. She hugged me, and we left.
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Outside, my mother encountered a colleague who had also made it out. They stopped to talk. I don’t remember much of their conversation, but I remember becoming anxious.