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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Theron" data-source="post: 99290" data-attributes="member: 2326">It feels a little strange relating what was such a relatively uneventful experience.  I knew no one in New York or DC, and never worried about anyone's safety except in the most abstract terms.  But what the heck?  It still wakes me up in the middle of the night at least once a month and I still can't look at a plane in flight the same way.  So here's my story...It was a pretty normal day thus far.  I'd gotten up, gotten myself and the kid dressed, dropped him off at day care, and was checking my e-mail before going off to work myself.  Then the wife called from her office."Turn on the TV, some idiot flew a plane into the World Trade Center".  So I did...and saw the gaping hole from the first impact.  And another plane flying into the picture and straight into the other tower.  There was a millisecond of "What the hell is wrong with the air traffic control system?" as my mind tried to come up with a rational explanation of what I'd just seen.  Then the realization hit me.  I called my wife and told her, "That was no accident and it's worse than you can imagine".I watched for as long as I could before heading to the office.  At that point, both towers were still standing.  I stopped for gas and heard on the radio that the Pentagon had been hit.  Just before I got to the office, the NPR announcer interrupted himself to say, "One of the towers has collapsed".  How I managed to keep from wrecking the car right then and there, I'll never know.  But I drove the rest of the way with tears in my eyes.When I got to work (a medical clinic), we had the TV on in the waiting area and everyone was watching.  My boss decided to keep us open, since she felt the last thing we should do is deprive indigent people of medical care at a time like that.For the rest of the day, the horror stories poured in.  Meanwhile, my wife was sent home from work because her office is in a tall building and Houston is at the heart of the petroleum industry.  Downtown was a ghost town withiin a matter of hours.When I drove home that night, everything seemed eerily calm, like the entire city was holding its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.  I got home and held my kid, and had another long cry (which probably confused him, since he wasn't even two at the time), wondering what sort of world I'd brought him into.That night, I called my folks.  Being one of the "senior set" as gamers go (I'll be 39 in a couple of months), my folks lived through WWII and remember Pearl Harbor from their childhood.  For the first time, my dad and I could discuss something like that with some degree of a common frame of reference.  Somehow, talking about something that happened sixty years ago made me feel a bit better about the future.</blockquote>

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