Where were you when ...?

This morning, I woke up at 7 as usual, laid in bed until 7:30, got up, ate a bowl of cereal, checked my email, poured my coffee into a thermos and headed out the door.

I drove my boyfriend to work, headed onto the Whitemud, sang along with the radio and started to plan my day in my head.

I thought about the interviews I had to do, the conference I would attend in the afternoon, and allowed myself a moment of excitement at the thought of tonight's party. It never occurred to me that there was anything remarkable about today, anything significant other than the fact that it's Friday.

And then, as I was turning off the highway at my usual exit, the radio station played a series of sound clips — a woman screaming, a news anchor saying "Smoke is pouring out of the Pentagon," a woman saying "And then he said, 'I just called to tell y'all I love you,'" a man yelling "Oh my God, there's another one" with screams audible in the background. A weight immediately settled across my shoulders. September 11. How could I have forgotten?

It's been eight years, but my reaction to the sound clips is still visceral. 9/11/01 was a day that changed the world — it changed lives, it changed policy, it set countless stories in motion. And, on a more personal level, it was the day I woke up out of my childhood and truly began to think about the world around me.

I was 15, in my second week of Grade 11 at my high school in Mississauga, Ontario. I was walking with my friends to our second-period music class. It was about 9:45 by then. We passed another kid in our grade who was leaning casually by the water fountain outside the gym. "Did you hear?" he said. "The World Trade Centre's been bombed by terrorists."

It's a sign of how deeply self-involved I was then that I couldn't even picture the World Trade Centre in my mind. I had never been to New York City and no one had ever sat me down in front of a picture of the skyline and pointed out the twin towers. Why would they?

We walked into our classroom and made a beeline for the teacher, who was sitting behind the piano.

"Jonathan said the World Trade Centre was bombed by terrorists," I said by way of greeting.

Our teacher didn't skip a beat. "I don't know anything about that," she said.

As more students trickled in, there was vague chatter about a terrorist attack, but the teacher launched straight into the lesson and there was no more time for talk.

The class ended shortly after 11. I was hungry and looking forward to my third-period lunch. The vague bombing talk had been forgotten. I was heading to the cafeteria when our principal's voice came over the PA system.

Calmly, without preamble, he informed the silent hallways what had happened. Planes had flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center earlier that morning. Both had collapsed. Another plane had crashed into the Pentagon; a fourth had crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Thousands were believed to be dead. The situation was still developing. Students who wished to contact their parents and leave school early would be permitted to do so.

The principal ended his address by asking everyone to observe two minutes of silence immediately following the announcement.

I looked around. The hallways were jammed with people on their way to lunch or their next class. People were hugging, some were crying silently. Others leaned against the lockers with blank faces. It was a long, tense, suspended moment. I had to close my eyes.

I took my lunch outside and sat on the front steps of the school. It was a beautiful, sunny day, not a cloud in the sky. Some of my older, more knowledgeable friends talked over my head about the attacks. Unfamiliar words — "Syria," "Osama bin Laden," "jihad," "Saddam Hussein" — drifted down to my ears, meaningless without context.

I stayed at school for the rest of the day, watching CNN. My English teacher tried to encourage us to talk about our reactions to what we were seeing but conversation was thin on the ground. For probably the first time in my life, I had nothing to contribute. I didn't understand any of what I was seeing and hearing. Everything around me — the classroom walls, the desks, the novels and plays stacked on the shelves, the bowed heads of my classmates — seemed improbably normal. After such a momentous and tragic event, shouldn't the laws of gravity have been overturned? Shouldn't the sun have just set at 10 in the morning and refused to come up ever again? How could it not signify the imminent end of the world?

I still experience a moment like that every September 11. It feels wrong somehow to treat it as just another day. The date should be retired from the calendar, like the jersey number of a beloved hockey player. We should skip straight from Sept. 10 to Sept. 12 the same way high-rise apartments omit the thirteenth floor.

I've told my personal 9/11 story countless times. It's not particularly dramatic or moving; I was still a kid with a kid's bewildered, self-interested awareness of world events. But it still feels constructive to remember, to consider the world we inherited that day upon the spectacular death of innocence. It imbued me with an energy to know, to learn, to understand, to combat ignorance, especially my own.

We were all there that day, in one way or another. What did it mean to you?