I was in middle school, about 90 miles north of NYC, in a school district where a lot of parents commuted to the city for work. It was a cloudless morning, near

I was in middle school, about 90 miles north of NYC, in a school district where a lot of parents commuted to the city for work. It was a cloudless morning, near the start of the school year — I was in 7th grade, and my dad had commuted into the city as usual. Sometime during the day we became aware that something was going on, but the faculty kept us in the dark. A lot of my classmates also had parents who worked in the city, and I think the administration was wary of upsetting anyone before we were sure if anyone was directly impacted. Regardless, some news trickled in, but most of it was wrong. I remember one classmate saying she'd heard that the Pentagon had been bombed. I found that so upsetting. Near the end of the day, my social studies teacher told us everything she knew. As she said: "my job is to teach history, and this is history." Most of what she knew was wrong — information was very fluid that day and the news didn't know what to report — but I appreciate what she did. My dad got home late that night. He'd been in his Midtown office when the second plane hit, watching from a colleague's corner office. They evacuated the whole building, and he started running for Central Park — nobody was sure what was happening, and he wanted to be in a wide-open space in case the city was being bombed. He said cabbies were parked along the streets with their doors open and their radios turned up, so people on the street could hear the news as they ran. He made it to Grand Central to catch one of the last trains out of New York, but they were evacuated twice due to bomb threats from opportunistic copycats. He considered walking uptown to stay with relatives who lived in the city, but finally they let him on the train. He caught the last train out of Manhattan. He remembers vividly sitting on the train silently along with the other commuters. There was a woman on his car who was covered in ash and smoke, and she burst into tears as the train passed out of Manhattan. For days, surfaces throughout the city were covered with home-printed posters of missing relatives. Miraculously, nobody's parents from my school district were killed that day. My dad started taking steps to work closer-to-home and out of New York City soon after.