Remember

I hope my friends don't think I'm copying them by doing this post, but it seems wrong to let this day pass without blogging about what I remember.

I was in seventh grade living about 40 miles from the Pentagon. School had already started because it was the east coast. We started getting tiny bits of gossipy information from the kids that had cell phones then. Then parents started flooding the hall ways. The teachers wouldn't explain what was going on and we really wanted to know. My mom picked me up just before lunch and we went back to my grandmother's house where we were staying for a month or two. We watched the news all night (and, I'm ashamed to say, watched and hoped for school in our county to be cancelled the next day like most of the surrounding counties). Once it got dark we went to the fence and held candles. Most of the neighbors did the same thing. There were about a million vigils to hold and people to pray for.

A lot of the messages I've seen posted about 9/11 today seem to be trying to get across a political point (about the war, about the mosque, etc.). For once can we just remember how it was that day just to remember? We could learn something from how we acted that day. We all became Americans and stopped battling each other for once.

I say this because I mean it, not to be trite: I will always remember.