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I live directly across the street from our neighborhood elementary school, and on 9/11 I sat on this school's playground with my young children as they circled in a mix of playfulness and aimlessness. They knew something terrible was around: delivered home from school at midday and now this playground eerily empty. A security guard, full of intimidation, questioned me: why were we there, where did we live, etc. Shocking to me. All of us scared. I pointed to our house directly across the street and explained I wanted to take my children away from the images, the endless rerunning of crashing towers and falling-off people.
Galway Kinnell (who lived in sight of the towers for twenty years) in his poem “When the Towers Fell” described the attack as follows:
The plane screamed low down lower Fifth Avenue, lifted at the Arch, someone said, shaking the dog walkers in Washington Square Park, drove for the north tower, struck with a heavy thud, releasing a huge bright gush of blackened fire, and vanished, leaving a hole the size and shape a cartoon plane might make if it had passed harmlessly through and were flying away now, on the far side, back into the realm of the imaginary… The towers burn and fall, burn and fall—in a distant shot, smokestacks spewing oily earth remnants out of the past.