Where were you on 9/11?

We remember some dates because we write them on calendars.

Others are written on us.

September 11, 2001, is one of those dates.

Ask almost anyone old enough to remember that Tuesday morning, “Where were you on 9/11?” and chances are they can tell you.

I can.

I was an elementary school teacher, but I wasn’t at school that morning. I had come home with a migraine. One of the strange things about my migraines was that having the television on could sometimes help with the noise in my head. So I was lying at home with NBC’s “Today” show playing in the background.

Then television stopped being background noise.

At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Like millions of Americans watching the first reports, I didn’t immediately understand what I was seeing. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Was it a terrible accident? How could something like that happen?

Then, at 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower.

I knew.

We all knew.

This was no accident.

The migraine that was so debilitating when I came home suddenly relinquished its hold as  I watched the unimaginable unfold in real time.

At 9:37 a.m., another plane struck the Pentagon.

At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed.

At 10:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers and crew fought back against the hijackers.

At 10:28 a.m., the North Tower fell.

Less than two hours had passed.

America had changed.

Across East Tennessee, thousands of ordinary mornings were interrupted.

Families starting their day had their world stop when someone called and told them to turn on the television.

Driving to work, people knew their day was changed when the radio announcer abandoned the regular programming and began describing smoke pouring from a tower in New York.

Restaurants heard customers talking over breakfast suddenly quietened as they stared silently at a screen mounted in the corner.

And inside schools, teachers and principals faced an especially difficult question: How much do we tell the children?

Some students were too young to understand terrorism, hijacked airplanes or why adults suddenly looked frightened. Yet they understood something was wrong.

They always do.

We were separated by miles but connected by what we were watching.

But there are 658 people whose answer to “Where were you?” we know.

Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm, occupied offices on floors 101 through 105 of the North Tower — above where American Airlines Flight 11 struck. Of Cantor Fitzgerald’s 960 New York employees, 658 were at work that morning.

Every one of them died.

The company lost nearly 70% of its New York workforce. The 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees represented nearly one-fourth of all those killed in the attacks.

Yet the company’s chairman and CEO, Howard Lutnick, survived because of one of those seemingly ordinary family moments that, in retrospect, changed everything. He was taking his 5-year-old son, Kyle, to his first day of kindergarten.

His brother Gary was not so fortunate.

Gary Lutnick, 36, was among the 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees killed. Howard Lutnick later recalled learning that his brother had tried to reach him that morning.

Imagine carrying that loss for the rest of your life.

Lutnick also carried responsibility for hundreds of other grieving families. Cantor Fitzgerald was devastated financially as well as personally, but he pledged 25% of the company’s profits for five years to the families of those who died and promised to provide their health care coverage for 10 years.

The company ultimately provided $180 million in support.

But the commitment did not end with money.

Lutnick made another promise — one that would take decades to fulfill.

He offered a job to every child of every Cantor Fitzgerald employee killed on 9/11. If they wanted to come to work for the company where their mother or father had worked, Cantor Fitzgerald would find a place for them and give them a chance to begin their careers.

By 2016, 57 of those children had worked for Cantor Fitzgerald.

Think about what that promise meant in 2001. Many of those children were babies or elementary school students. Some had not even been born. The promise wasn’t for the next month or the next year. It was a promise Cantor Fitzgerald would have to remember when those children grew up.

And it did.

That may be the most powerful part of the Cantor Fitzgerald story. The company didn’t simply promise to remember the 658 people it lost.

It promised to remember their families.

We often ask one another, “Where were you on 9/11?”

We know where those 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees were.

They had gone to work.

Just as millions of Americans did that Tuesday morning.

In the days that followed, flags appeared everywhere.

Churches filled.

Neighbors checked on neighbors.

People called family members simply because they needed to hear their voices.

We thanked firefighters, police officers and first responders differently because we had watched hundreds of them run toward danger while everyone else was trying to escape it.

Twenty-five years later, the youngest Americans have no memory of Sept. 11, 2001. For them, 9/11 is history.

For those of us who lived through that morning, it is different.

I don’t have to look at an old calendar to remember where I was.

I remember being an elementary teacher who should have been at school but was home because of a migraine.

I remember the television being on because I wanted something to quiet the noise in my head.

I remember the “Today” show.

I remember seeing the first tower.

I remember seeing the second plane.

And I remember the moment confusion became certainty and I wanted my family home.

The question “Where were you on 9/11?” is really about more than geography.

It asks us where we were when an ordinary Tuesday morning became a dividing line between before and after.

I know where I was.

Do you remember where you were?

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