I was standing in the lobby of my office talking to the receptionist when a girl walked in & said did you hear a plane crashed into the World Trade Center? I said no, but like many just thought it was a small plane with a pilot & maybe one or two others aboard. She then said something like 'actually it was two planes'.
The hair on my neck stood up. I ran upstairs to another office & burst in & my colleague was listening to the radio with his mouth hanging open. It was a few minutes after I got up there that the news of the Pentagon situation was reported & we were just floored.
We left the building & walked into town in search of a TV, found a lone bar with an open door, they weren't open for lunch yet but since the door was open we wandered in. One by one others filed in & watched the TV hanging above the door, we, this crowd, stood there for what seemed like all day in silence, probably in shock; to this day the image of this crowd is the most indelible image baked in my brain. I was 35 years old at the time.
My son was 5 at the time, within a few days of these events I happened upon this drawing in his room, he had a similar much larger version on his chalk board, I can't find the photo of it but I snapped this one from the box of art:
A couple years after that I took him to work with me one day, a day that took me into downtown Philly. As we drove over the bridge into the city he pointed in the general direction of the skyscrapers & said "daddy is that the building that the plane flew into?"
Just a surreal piece of history to all of us that experienced it.