A Day at Pause

I don't remember actually being told what had happened then.  That wasn't really what affected me that day.  It was my principal interrupting my class to talk to my teacher.  You see, that had never happened before, it was confusing and troubling to all of us, especially when they left the room to talk and left us alone.  We all knew that something had happened but we just didn't know what it was yet.
My mom had a man from church bring my older brother, Matthew, home early since that man was a teacher at school and already was leaving.  She knew that he, out of all of us, would react the worst.  Matthew has always been the most sensitive to things like that and had a tendency to worry himself sick.
Though the teachers told us what had happened and had us pray for the victims, I don't think that it really hit home to me until I actually saw some of the clips and pictures when we got home.  Andrew, my younger brother was eventually forbidden from watching the videos and seeing the pictures after he had begun to sob uncontrollably after looking through the Time magazine.
My Uncle Robin called because he worked in Washington DC and it had scared him.  We don't hear from him much and it was one of the only times that he had actually initialized the contact.  Though most of us are friends with him on facebook, we haven't actually heard much from in years.  But we can count on him to always come home to us when he feels that he needs protection or a refuge.
That day, I looked at the sky differently.  Flight 97 had probably flown somewhere overhead near where I went to school and lived.
That day stopped air travel, work, school, and many more things.  Even now people still pause today in remembrance of what happened.  It brought America to its knees for that short while just before we got up swinging. 
America as one, in the words of a famous song, cried out, "I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never going keep me down."  We were shaken but we were not broken.