I remember

I was sitting in my internal audit class during my senior year at Lipscomb University.  I received a text message on my beeper from Clarence.  We were engaged then, not married yet.  He told me that a plane crashed into one of the World Trade Center buildings.  I remember wondering what in the world was going on.  Terrorism was not the first thing that came to mind.  Then I left school a short time later to go to a meeting as part of my internship with HCA.  I remember hearing nothing but news about the two planes that had now crashed into the Towers.  I remember driving down I-40 near the airport and not seeing one plane in the sky.  It was the weirdest feeling.  I wasn't really sure what to feel.  Once I arrived at the conference center where our meeting was to be held, it was decided that it just didn't seem right to go ahead with the meeting.  So, we all left and I headed on to the office where my internship was.  I remember one of the ladies in the office bringing her young son to work with her that day because she just couldn't bear to take him to daycare.  I didn't really understand it then, but now that I'm a mother, I do.  In times like those, you want to keep your children close.  You want to feel like you are protecting them and that they feel safe, even if they don't really know what is going on.  I remember hearing Lee Greenwood's song on the radio and tears coming to my eyes because "I am proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free, and I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me, and I'll gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today.  Because there ain't no doubt I love this land.  God Bless the U.S.A."  Never before that day did that song mean so much to me, did I have so much pride in our Country.  I remember seeing the footage of the towers falling and people jumping from windows so many stories above the ground.  I was shocked by those images among many others.  I had that strange compulsion to keep watching the footage in complete disbelief.  I will never forget that day and all the lives that were lost.  It still stuns me today that our Country was the victim of such an attack.  It is almost unreal that it was such a premeditated action.  9.11.01, 9-1-1.  Unbelievable.  I remember.  10 years later.  I will never forget.