Twenty-five years ago today I was in Houston, Texas. I worked at NASA’s Off-site Integrated Planning System helpdesk, just outside the gate of the Johnson Space Center. I was nineteen.

I have been a coffee addict my whole life. That morning I stepped out of the secured computer room to refill my mug. There was an old CRT television on a stand above the coffee pot. CNN was on. The first tower was burning, and the headline across the bottom read “PLANE CRASHES INTO WORLD TRADE CENTER.”

I had just started flying lessons for my private pilot’s license at Ellington Field, a few miles down the road. So my brain filled in the only plane it knew. I pictured a little Cessna, like the ones I had been practicing in, wedged into the side of the building.

In typical autistic fashion, I tried to make a joke. There was a man ahead of me who had just filled his cup. I turned to him and said:

“Jesus! How blind do you have to be to not see a huge skyscraper in your way?”

He looked at me like I had two heads. Then he said, slowly, the way you talk to someone who is not going to get it: “They think it’s terrorism.”

“Terrorism?” I said. “Who would want to attack the US?”

I refilled my coffee and went back into the computer room.

And that is what I remember about September 11, 2001. Not the second plane. Not the towers coming down. A coffee pot, a CRT, a bad joke, and a stranger who understood something about the world that I did not yet.