Sunday, the middle day of our beautiful 3 day holiday weekend, I took Penny to a park.

Earlier in the day I had watched my favorite television show, Sunday Morning, which was filled with stories about September 11, 2001 and the fact that this year will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of that day.

It hardly seems possible that twenty-five years have gone by. I remember the details of where I was and what I was doing when that attack happened like it was just last week.

I remember hearing it first from one of the women in my department whose teen daughter was home watching TV.

She said her daughter called and while they were talking a second plane had hit. She was watching the news. We figured it was just footage of the same plane, being shown over and over, like the news does.

We figured it was a small, private plane and a terrible accident.

As the story grew my staff became more agitated and scared. My job was to keep everybody calm.

I was calling my husband who worked nights and was home asleep. He wasn’t picking up the phone. I knew he would want to know so I kept trying. Our answering machine kept asking if I wanted to leave a message. I finally did.

I told him to turn on the TV.

One woman in my department was becoming hysterical because she couldn’t get in touch with her husband who, it turns out, worked for the federal government. By then we knew the Pentagon had been hit. I thought he was working in DC. We called someone to come and get her.

Other employees who felt they needed to be at home were allowed to go.

Back then there was no TV at work, no social media, no internet at all for us to keep up with the news but family and friends called and emailed with updates. No further work was accomplished that day.

But that was OK.

We drove home that afternoon listening to our car radios, still unable to grasp the entirety of what had happened.

And though it seems like it was yesterday, there are adults in our world today that were toddlers, babies, or not even born yet who don’t have these memories, have only the stories told to them by older folk.

I imagine it feels to them something like Pearl Harbor feels to me. I know Sunday, December 7, 1941 was important. I know it changed the world, but I don’t feel it inside of me the same way I feel September 11th.

Last Sunday as Penny and I walked around a lake, enjoying the brilliant blue sky I remembered the events of that September blue sky Tuesday morning and how it changed the world.

And I hope we never see such a thing like it again. But in my heart I know that some future generation will have it’s own moment that changes everything and they will, someday, walk and contemplate history just like we do now.