To divert myself from myself...I am going to share what I was doing on 9/11.
It was my freshman year at UMD. I had just moved into my hotel room dorm. I was "one of those kids" who applied for college at the last second, was accepted, and then placed into overflow housing. Overflow housing at UMD consisted of living in a hotel on the shore of Lake Superior...which was pretty fantastic, aside from the fact that my parents didn't allow me to have a car, and I had to take a shuttle bus every time I needed to go to campus.
I was supposed to be in a Philosophy class. While I was walking through the halls, I noticed they were baron. It was a very odd feeling. The class started at 8am, being the ambitious college student that I was (for the first week of school at least...) I was ten minutes early. I heard the faint buzzing of an overhead radio, but my ears had to be lying to me. The radio was telling me that an airplane had crashed into a building in NYC...HUH? Once I reached class and had learned that the radio hadn't been lying, I v-lined it to a friend's on-campus apartment. When she answered the door, we both dropped our jaws and agreed this couldn't be happening. She told me she was going to change quick, but to take a seat in her living room and watch tv. It wasn't 30 seconds after I had sat down that I witnessed the second plane hit the second tower. I shouted for my friend, who raced into the living room. Thinking about that moment still brings chills down my spine, and a tear to my eye.
Throughout the day, I heard rumors that gas was going to spike to six dollars a gallon. I was told airplanes were grounded nation wide. When I looked out my hotel-dorm window, to see an airplane flying I had a mini anxiety attack, and called my mom. She informed me that there was an airbase close by, and the only planes allowed to fly were military planes. This calmed me, but only slightly.
Around 8pm that night I received a phone call. My uncle had suffered a major heart attack. The episode left him in a coma. I hadn't been allowed to bring a car with me to college. I felt stranded, and was longing to be home with my family. My mom made it to duluth by 11, and we were on our way back to the cities. We didn't say much on the car ride home...It was the longest two hours of my life.
When I returned to school the next week, my uncle was still hanging onto his life. I had wanted to stay with my family until all was said and done, but my parents pushed me to go back to duluth. My uncle passed away the next day.
It wasn't the start to my college career that I had hoped for... I guess you can say I learned the hard way you can't always get what you want.
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