On 9/11/2001 I was far from home.

I was in Atlanta at a training class for my work. It was a two-week class, and this was Tuesday of the second week -- it already seemed like a long time that I'd been away from my family in the Midwest.

We were in the Eastern time zone, so class was in session when we heard the news. An instructor came into the room and spoke with our instructor for a few minutes. Then he told us that two planes had struck the World Trade Center towers, and it was believed to be a terrorist attack.

It was a bad time to be far from my family. Firstborn was living in Chicago, and of course I thought of the Sears Tower as another possible target. (So did the Chicago police.) I didn't have a cell phone then, so I would have to wait until I could got back to my hotel to call my family members and reassure myself.

I will never forget how our class, as a group of people all far from home and thrown together, made ourselves a support group for each other. We had never all gone out to lunch together before; usually went our own way in twos and threes, but that day we all went to a fast-food place. One woman was very worried: she was from New York, and she knew her brother had a job interview scheduled at the WTC for that morning, and she hadn't been able to reach him on his cell phone. She left class the next day and drove home in her rental car (as nothing was flying, of course).

They dismissed us early that day, at around 1:30 as I recall. The office building where the class took place was closing down, by order of -- security? The police? I don't know; I only know that many buildings, offices, stores closed early that day. I went back to my hotel room and watched the coverage on TV, and talked to my family on the phone, and cried.

The class resumed the next day, and we all kind of threw ourselves into study in order to block out the worst of it. The horrible event had certainly broken any remaining ice between us; we were practically a family for the remainder of that week. Even now, we e-mail each other every year on the anniversary. I can still see all their faces, hear their voices, remember them as well as if we'd spent a year together instead of just two weeks in September of 2001.