9/11 Have I written this down somewhere over the past 25 years? I probably have, but even if I have, I feel like doing so again. I was in Hannover in Germany that day, teaching an IT class. It was the afternoon, about 3 or 4pm, and the class was about to wrap up. People were doing some final exercises and I made my round among them to give a hand or answer a question here or there. At this point one of my students came in and said that in New York, a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers. “That’s a joke,” I replied, inflecting my voice upward at the end to make it hover somewhere between a counterclaim and a question. “I’m not making jokes about things like that,” he said.

I wrapped up the class quickly and drove back to my hotel to check the news for myself. This was still a time when news happened mostly on television, and the huge spike in traffic on the internet brought down pretty much all of it on that day, including whatever primitive websites the news organizations had. By the time I reached the hotel, the second plane had flown into the second tower and maybe one of the towers had already collapsed.

I decided the most important thing was to get gas into my car, so I’d be able to make it back to Berlin to my girlfriend and her daughter the next day. Because maybe the gas stations would no longer be open the next day. I thought anything could happen, right up to World War III. I remember driving up to the nearest gas station, which was completely empty, and I wondered whether the owner inside had already heard the news. I wasn’t going to tell him.

Back in the hotel, I continued watching the news, and called my girlfriend. I scribbled a few words into a notebook to record my feelings, which I felt was appropriate on a day like this. I was afraid.