25 years ago this morning I was sitting in freshman year religion class with Brother Matt at St. Joseph’s High School in Metuchen, NJ. I was a 14-year-old.
Brother Matt was the funniest teacher at the school and did a dead-on Greta Van Susteren impression. He would get a room full of freshman howling during a lesson on the Beatitudes.
But that morning, Brother Matt turned on CNN and he didn’t make a joke for the rest of the day.
Brother Matt told us that a plane struck one of the Twin Towers. The kid next to me started crying, one of his parents worked at the World Trade Center or close enough that the details didn’t matter.
We then watched the second plane hit live as it happened. The room went quiet.
The next thing I remember was walking across campus to the main building and into the office of Mr. Gandy, the head of admissions and student favorite. He told me the Pentagon was hit. Someone said, “we’re at war.”
School was let out early. Monica, my friend Ben’s mom, picked us up and drove us back to our part of the state. We stopped at Washington Rock, where George Washington watched the British troop movements in 1777.
From there you have a clear and direct view to the Manhattan skyline. We left the PT Cruiser and could see smoke pouring out of the island, drifting south. We didn’t say a word until we got back in the car.
My dad worked in the city and phones didn’t work. Did he get out? When will service come back? Are more planes coming?
I was lucky that my dad came home that night.
The fear faded, faster than we thought it would, because the United States came together in a way that brought calm to a scared kid in New Jersey.
I’m 39 now and my kids will know 9/11 like how I knew Pearl Harbor. A thing that happened to people’s parents. When they learn about 9/11 and ask me about it, I’ll tell them about Brother Matt not telling a joke that day. Not about the smoke we saw at Washington Rock or about waiting for the phone to ring.