Ten years ago, I was living with my friend Kevin in his apartment in the Haight district of San Francisco. I used to wake up to the classical music channel every morning on the clock radio (I don’t even use an alarm clock these days–no point). I remember waking up to music, but then when the music faded, they broke for a news report about the one of the twin towers in NYC being hit by a plane. No one knew why yet. I think everyone assumed it was a really incompetent pilot.
So I went in to work, and heard about the other planes hitting their targets. I spent the rest of the day glued to streaming video news on my work computer. I watched the towers crumble. The ATPo board was full of anxious posts as we worried over our NYC friends, and waited for each to check in (http://www.atpobtvs.com/existentialscoobies/archives/sep.html).
At some point, it was revealed that one of the planes, the one that crashed in rural Pennsylvania because the brave passengers took it away from its target, was originally bound for San Francisco. Many SFers were on the plane. None that I knew personally.
I went to New York in July of 2005 along with many ATPoers to hang out with each other and see the city. midnightsjane and I took a double-decker bus ride around lower Manhattan, and saw ground zero, among other sights.
I guess the closest I came to losing anyone I knew in the disaster was wondering if that week was the week my writing coach was supposed to go to NYC to do a writing seminar for some New York executives in the tower. Turns out, it wasn’t.
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 
I totally forgot you and Jane went there. I must have left by then.
Thanks for linking the post.
Odd how 9/11 changed even ATPo. At least I felt like it drew everyone together. Even my schedule of getting on-line to check ATPo changed dramatically. My personal 9/11 story is pretty non-eventful, but I think I’ll post it anyway.
God, I *do* remember everyone posting that day asking about each of our NYC friends and being anxious for them to check in with us:
http://www.atpobtvs.com/existentialscoobies/archives/sep.html
We didn’t get very close to it, but it was one of the “sights” on the tour.
I remember waking up to music, but then when the music faded, they broke for a news report about the one of the twin towers in NYC being hit by a plane. No one knew why yet. I think everyone assumed it was a really incompetent pilot.
So I went in to work, and heard about the other planes hitting their targets. I spent the rest of the day glued to streaming video news on my work computer. I watched the towers crumble
That was my experience too, almost exactly. It is a measure of how freaked everyone was that all of a sudden we were wondering about the Columbia Tower, and even the Space Needle.
I remember San Francisco going on the alert, since they were a high profile port city, and one of the planes was originally bound for San Francisco. And of course there were still people old enough to remember going on alert in SF after Pearl Harbor in 1941.
I suppose we worried about icons such as the Golden Gate Bridge, or the financial district.