During a lunch break last week, a few of my co-workers and I were remembering where we were when John F. Kennedy was shot (for all but one of us, not yet born), what we remembered about the day the Space Shuttle exploded (three of us were sophomores in college), and finally, what we remembered about September 11, 2001 (the youngest of us was in fourth grade).
It’s interesting to pause and remember the days when we could freely meet friends and family members at the gate of their arriving flights, or when we didn’t need to remove our shoes or empty water bottles to go through airport security. When it wasn’t a jolt to see a an image picturing the Twin Towers as if they are a matter-of-fact part of New York City’s skyline.
And when I look at this picture of me with my cousin Cheri and my Aunt Sonia, I remember the Mother’s Day trip we took (along with my mom and Cheri’s mom, my Aunt Helen) to visit my brother Vern in New York City in May of 2000.
Here we are enjoying a leisurely dinner at Windows on the World, on the top floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, a little over a year before the world changed forever.
Here’s the post I wrote three years ago, on the tenth anniversary of The Day that Changed Everything.
maegregale.com 
I just can’t figure out how to tell my girls (5 and 6 yrs. old) about Sept. 11th because, though they were born into a post-9-11 world, we’ve never mentioned it. They know about some bad, scary things… shootings in our neighborhood, Iraq and Syria, the kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls… but for some reason I can’t bring myself to tell them about 9-11. I think that its just too vividly horrifying to me, even now, and how do you explain to two little girls who regularly fly to California to visit their grandparents that people used planes full of passengers as weapons? Maybe I’m just afraid that if I introduce the topic, the questions will never end and at some point I’ll be telling them about people who jumped out of hundred-story buildings.
Wow, Jen. That makes sense to me. They’ll know about all the details soon enough (even if that’s years from now), and hopefully not before they’re able to process it (well, as much as it can ever be truly processed) with more mature minds. It was a truly horrifying day.