The speaker - and I missed his name - allowed as how a generation ago, people marked the John F. Kennedy assassination as the watershed moment of their lives. Pretty much everyone who was alive and remembers that day can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news that Kennedy had been shot.

For today's generation, the radio commentator said, the Sept. 11 attacks are that defining moment.

Ask someone where they were when they heard that planes had flown into the World Trade Center towers and they can probably tell you.

For the record, I was at home in the Mitchell County town of Bakersville that day, tending to a sick child. My mother called me from Wendell and told me to turn the television on. I did. And I sat through much of the rest of the day watching the news reports. My mother was worried that someone might be planning some dastardly act closer to our home. I told her not to worry and that Wendell was probably pretty low on the terrorists' to-do list. Turns out I was right.

But the attacks that day prompted governments at all levels - including town governments - to assess their exposure to terrorist attacks.

One of the biggest concerns was protecting water safety. There aren't too many physical landmarks to destroy in eastern Wake County, but someone with evil intentions could hurt a lot of people by putting bad stuff in the water.

And so towns and counties and water authorities all over the place devised plans to ensure water safety in the event of an attack.

Transportation officials made new rules about flying in airplanes. I had never flown prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, so I don't have anything to compare today's airport experience to, but I must admit it's a frustration to walk through line after line, taking off my shoes, emptying my pockets, putting my shoes back on and refilling my pockets only to have to do that again when I get off the plane.

Still, I suppose I'm able to get off the plane in one piece due, in part, to the new safety rules we all must endure.

Whatever new public safety rules are in place, it's clear the Sept. 11 attacks had a profound effect on anyone who experienced it or watched it unfold live on television.

That makes for an interesting challenge for today's teachers. As reporter Andy Specht pointed out to me the other day, there's a whole crop of students in our schools who don't have that personal experience to relate to.

And though the attacks are just 10 years in our rearview mirrors, the topic will be dealt with in classrooms across Wake County in the days surrounding the anniversary. What will students most want to know about those events? Are they satisfied with simply learning the cold hard facts about that day? Or do they wonder why anyone would so callously take so many innocent lives?

Whatever the students may learn about those events, I'm interested in hearing about your remembrances of that day. Were you at work? Were you able to stop what you were doing and follow the breaking news? What thoughts were going through your mind as it became obvious this was no accident? Drop me a line at jwhitfield@newsobserver.com and let me know. I'll share some of the most interesting comments in a future column.