Twenty Years to Never Forget and Now To Fear Again

Some say that people want to forget and get on with things and yet for me, six years have passed and the memories are as clear as if they had happened yesterday. I can still remember that morning, beautiful as it was. The sky was a clear blue and you could see for miles. The air was fresh and crisp but tinged with the hint of the scents of fall.

My husband and I used to call days like that Villanova Days. Why Villanova Days? Because they reminded us of those happy and beautiful fall days when we had just returned to school and our lives were filled with the promise of so much.

Whenever a day was as gorgeous as September 11, 2001, it was a Villanova Day and I remember thinking that as I walked to work that morning the way I walk to work almost every morning.

We don’t call them Villanova Days anymore. They don’t bring joy anymore either, only sorrow.

I was at my desk when my husband called to say something was wrong with one of the Towers. He had just come out of the Holland Tunnel and had heard a horrendous noise. Everyone was looking upward and he stopped his car to see what was happening.

That was when he got on the cell phone to tell me that he thought he saw a tail of a plane in one of the World Trade Center Towers. He asked me to turn on my television and find out what was going on and call him back when I knew. I did turn on the television only to find out that no one knew much except that people had said that a plane had hit the Tower.

My first reaction was, “What kind of idiot could hit the tower on such a clear day?” It must have been the reaction of most New Yorkers who weren’t actually close to the Tower.

I watched for another minute or so, but then thought that I would have a better view from my boss’s office. He was in the adjacent conference room in a meeting and going into his office was not an issue. Plus, his office had spectacular views of downtown. I always loved being there in the early morning or at dusk when you could see the lights of the bridges and downtown buildings.

As I began to walk to his office, someone asked me what was going on and when I replied that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, she followed me. By the time we got to the office, there was a group of about ten or so with me, staring out the windows at the very visible fire and smoke emanating from the first tower. The comments were much the same.

How could anyone hit it on such a clear day? Isn’t that a lot of fire and smoke for a small plane?

It didn’t seem like that many minutes passed when the young woman next to me said, “Look at that plane? Where is it going?”

It was another plane, plowing through the canyons of the Manhattan buildings, looking small against the panorama of the taller skyscrapers.

And then the plane hit the second Tower. An explosion blasted from the side of the building and a shower of parts, papers and flames erupted into the bright blue sky. There was a collective hush in the room and then words I can’t even remember. Murmured voices in shock and horror. It was like I was seeing a Hollywood action movie, only it wasn’t a movie. It was real life.

My boss ran into the room to turn on his television and I said, “We’re being attacked. This is an attack.”

I thought of my husband, barely blocks away from the Towers. When someone called out from their desk that the Pentagon had been hit and that there were several unaccounted for planes, it occurred to me that other landmark buildings might be next.

That we might be next.

I left the office and ran to mine. Tried to call my husband and finally got through. All of the West Side of Manhattan had been closed down and they were about to start shutting down the entire island for security reasons.

I thought of my daughter in school in New Jersey. Alone with only friends and neighbors. I didn’t want her to be alone and my husband agreed. We had to get off Manhattan somehow.

He rushed to Midtown in his van and together with two other Jersey girls at the office, we began our trek home. My husband wanted to go through the Midtown Tunnel, but I couldn’t imagine going into a tunnel. The thought of an explosion in there terrified me.

So we headed to the Queensboro Bridge, all the time listening to the radio and the reports of what was going on downtown. We were on the bridge when we heard one of the Towers was falling. We saw the cloud billowing over downtown as we came onto the upper roadway of the bridge.

I remember thinking, it’s only been twenty minutes. Only twenty minutes. Our office at that time was on the 26th floor. We had to evacuate it twice via the stairs and it took us at least 30 minutes. Maybe even 40. I thought then that no one from above the 26th floor could have made it out. That thousands were possibly dead. We started crying.

When we reached Queens, the streets were clogged with people, watching the remaining tower and listening to news reports from their cars and buildings. We somehow crawled along the streets and made it to the expressway, and made it to roadways heading to New Jersey, stopping along the way for gas to be on the safe side.

At the gas station, a man was filling up his car. He had a gun tucked into his back waistband. I knew things had just gone from bad to worse if people were arming themselves.

On the highway once again, we were moved aside as a parade of emergency vehicles rushed toward Manhattan. At one point, all traffic was diverted off the highway to allow the emergency workers full access to the roads. Little did we know that we might have been seeing some of them for the last time.

We continued on through Brooklyn only to hear that the second Tower had come down and that the Pentagon was burning. Reports came of other missing planes.

My only thought was, “Let me get home for my daughter. If this is a war and we are going to die, I want her not to be alone.” We managed to reach a neighbor on the cell phone and tell them that we were okay and were headed home. That they should wait for our daughter at the bus stop and take her with them until we got there.

We made it to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Staten Island and the Jersey roadways. We were only one of a few cars that were up there. The spectacle that greeted us was one of a huge grey-white wave of smoke, so big it almost seemed like clouds, spreading all across lower Manhattan. The skyline was empty of the Towers and many of the other buildings were obscured by the large cloud drifting across Lower Manhattan.

In the waters below us, ferries and dozens of boats plowed through the Narrows, kicking up immense wakes as they rushed to and from Lower Manhattan to remove people from the area.

Ahead of us the roadways were clear and we made it home in time to meet my daughter at the bus stop. It was nearly 3. We had left Manhattan many hours earlier.

My daughter knew something was wrong that day even though the school had never told them what had happened. Parents had been coming to her school all day long to take their kids home. We explained about the Towers.

She was very upset because she had just been there a week earlier. A week earlier and she and her Dad might have been in the Towers during the attack. During the visit, she had met a lady in a nearby store while they were shopping. She and the lady had both been fashion lovers and had chatted.

She was worried about the lady and whether she had gotten out of the Tower. She refused to believe they could come down until like most Americans, we settled in front of the television to watch them fall again and again. To listen to the news and wonder why it had happened.

I went to work the next day, worried that our computer and phone systems would be affected by the electrical and communications issues that the collapse of the towers had created. Things were working. Maybe that wasn’t a good thing.

Fax after fax came in from overseas, expressing sympathy for what had happened. E-mail after e-mail. I worked with my boss to amass them, holding back tears as I did so. Wondering yet again, Why?

There are those who say we deserved it because of past actions and our affluence. That we are resented for all that we have and do not share. For all that we take and do not give. That for what we give, we ask for things in exchange.

Well, here’s something from someone who wasn’t born here. From someone who can say without reservation that this Nation shared its liberty with her. That this Nation gave her more than her own homeland did. That you cannot get something for nothing.

This Nation did not deserve 9/11 nor did those innocent people from all over the world who worked in that building and whose one bad action that morning was being responsible and going to work. People like my husband’s friend’s son who had just graduated from Villanova and taken a job at one of the financial firms destroyed by the attack. He’d been working there all of two weeks. Or like my niece’s softball coach, who never made it home.