Growing up in Chicago, we disliked the Twin Towers because they supplanted the Sears Tower as the tallest building in the world. Not that I was pleased to see them go down that way…
I was in Germany on 9/11/01. At first I heard some reports of a plane flying into the Pentagon (we were moving a piano at the time), I thought it was a sport plane like the Cessna pilot who tried to crash into the White House once…
Then we got a call from some panicked American friends to warn us that we were “at war”.