I’m from a small town an hour from Boston. I was in the fourth grade and had been in school that morning for about an hour when my teacher was called out of the classroom. She returned minutes later in tears but continued to teach our lesson. At recess there were kids talking about what happened but no one really knew. Our school principal did not authorize the teachers to tell us what was going on and gave that responsibility to our parents. It was a wicked weird day in school and a total mystery until I returned home. It was a beautiful, September morning, two days after my ninth birthday. I opened the door to my house and found my mom on the couch watching the news, sobbing. She sat me down and we watched the news all afternoon together. I’ll never forget how disturbed I was. I completely understood what happened. My mother told me terrorists from the Middle East probably hijacked the planes because they didn’t like our capitalism or religion. I was dumbfounded, of course. What reason could there possibly be for this? Later I found out that a friend’s family had missed their flight that day… they had tickets for flight 93 out of Boston to LA, which was hijacked and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.