"At this time, I would like all teachers to stop teaching."
Then there was a pause.
"Students, stop writing, put down your pens."
Another pause followed.
That is all I remember verbatim from that day. The principal then told us that everything was OK.
Then he told us the second plane hit, but that everything was still OK. Now that 10 years has passed since 9/11, I sometimes believe I gained those years, in that one day, after he told us that the first tower had collapsed.
From my seventh grade classroom in Harlem, I could see the cloud of dust that seemed to hang over all of lower Manhattan.
Like most of the kids at school that day, I was happy mainly because we had gotten out early. It didn't really dawn upon me what had just happened to my city, to my country, and to peoples' families.
Public transportation was shut down but, 12-year-old me used the money that my cousin gave me to take a taxi home on a slice of pizza, a slushy, and a couple games of Pac-Man at the pizzeria I got it from.
It never once crossed my mind that my mother was attending classes at Drake Business School right near the World Trade Center on that day. It didn't occur to me that she had to walk home across the Brooklyn Bridge, covered in all that stuff that firefighters breathed in are believed to have caught cancer from now.
All I saw was a cloud. All I knew was that there wasn't going to be school for the next couple of days.
My mother told me how she had given up, found a place to sit, and had made peace with her maker.
"Miss, you can't sit here, move, walk, now," said a firefighter.
She told me this, years after that dreadful day.
I remember waking up in the middle of the night, while staying with my brother in Manhattan, because I could not get home to my mother's house in Brooklyn. I was 12, I had no cell phone, and my brother wasn't home.
When I woke up he was fast asleep. On the living room floor was a pile of dusty work clothes and a volunteer shirt. On the dresser, a half-destroyed photo of what had to be a couple of co-workers from within the towers sat. I knew exactly where he was.
There would be many nights like this, as he helped in the search for survivors until all the debris was cleared.
They never gave up.
As we commemorate the resilience of our people 10 years later, I just want to say, never give up. Do not dwell on the past, but don't take anything for granted.
Remember September 11, 2001. Never give up.
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