09/11/2026
I’ll never forget where I was on September 11th.
I was sitting in my middle school classroom, watching one of those old TVs strapped to a rolling cart. Like so many others that day, we sat there watching everything unfold right in front of us.
I remember the news, the rumors going around, and the teachers trying to make sense of something none of us really understood at that age.
My teacher was Miss DiGrazia. I still remember she wore her Yankees shirt every Friday. Being from New York, it hit her personally. At some point she had to leave the classroom, and we had a substitute for the rest of the day. Everything just felt chaotic.
At that age, we didn’t understand the politics or the magnitude of what had happened. We just knew our country had been attacked. I remember all of us saying things like, “We’re gonna go get ’em.” That was about as much as a bunch of middle school kids could process.
But what I remember just as much as the tragedy was what happened afterward.
America came together.
For a while, it didn’t seem to matter where you came from, what you looked like, who you voted for, or what your differences were. We were Americans. We wanted to protect our country, protect our people, and take care of each other.
You could feel that unity everywhere, and for years afterward you could still feel pieces of it.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of that faded.
Out of one of the darkest days our country has ever experienced, there was at least a little bit of light in seeing how people came together.
Today, 25 years later, I just wanted to take a minute to remember the people who went to work that morning and never came home, the first responders who ran toward danger, the families whose lives changed forever, and everyone we lost.
Never forget. 🇺🇸
