The morning of September 11, 2001 was marked by incredibly blue skies and sunshine. A perfect morning.
I’d just dropped my son Billy off at the school bus. He was in fourth grade then, and the year had just started. It was primary day, and I decided to take a break before editing at home, they way I did then, four days a week — traveling into New York City only on Fridays, so that I’d be home for all the Scout and after-school activities.
Settling down with breakfast, I turned on the TV to watch the first ten minutes of Regis & Kelly, glancing at the newspaper.
But on the television screen, there was no morning show. Newscasters had interrupted regularly scheduled programming to announce that a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I remember thinking, how could anyone be so blind, hitting such an enormous building?
And then, the terror crept in. The voice of the man stranded in his office on one of the top floors, calling ABC News and trying to remain calm as he begged for help — minutes before that building collapsed, and he was gone. Watching, one by one, as those mighty towers fell, as our world changed forever. I remember Peter Jennings, the consummate journalist, his eyes filled with tears and his voice cracking as he said if there were children in the room watching, God help us all.
I remember the phone ringing, so many, many friends calling to see if I had gone in to New York City to work that day. I remember calling my son’s elementary school, hearing the relief in the secretary’s voice when she heard I was home. I remember trying to call my office in New York, but all circuits were busy, busy for so long. I remember wanting to run, not walk, to my son’s school, scoop up my son and hold him so close that nothing could ever hurt him.
For hours, I sat in front of that television set, watching images that are forever seared onto our hearts and minds as a nation. I listened as a woman called in to the news station, begging the newscasters to help her find her husband, who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “I need my husband to come home.”
And I remember the next day, what would have been my mother’s 61st birthday, if she were alive. For one of the only times, I was glad that my mother wasn’t alive anymore, to see what had happened to her beloved lower Manhattan. My mother worked downtown, steps from the World Trade Center. And, after that first horrific bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 — she wasn’t at work that day, she was home fighting cancer — she warned me that the terrorists would return. When I told her that I wanted to take my toddler to a children’s event at the World Trade Center, she made me promise, swear, that I’d never take him there. “It will happen again,” she said.
And she was right.
The day after 9/11, the nightmare became even more unthinkable. The father of one of my son’s closest friends, who lived out on the East End but was still a firefighter in Brooklyn, never came home. He wasn’t even supposed to be working that day. His wife, my friend, was days away from giving birth to their fourth child.
I’d just seen Andrew Jordan, with his oldest son at a soccer sign-up that weekend. I asked him if they knew yet, what the baby would be. “No,” he said, smiling. “We want it to be a surprise.”
He never met his beautiful baby boy.
Andrew Jordan was a hero long before 9/11, a warm, kind man who came to the kids’ elementary school and let the children try on his firefighter boots and hat. A man who never should have died that day, who should have lived to see what an amazing job his wife has done, raising their four children with love, honor and dignity. To see his oldest become a teacher this year, passing on his legacy of love for children.
On the days when I had to go back to New York City to work, after 9/11, the city was cloaked with a gray blanket of silence — and incredible kindness shown by strangers, unified by heavy grief. Fluttering in the wind were the hundreds, thousands of posters: “Have you seen my husband? My wife? My son? My daughter?” The faces of the lost on those posters haunt me still.
And at home, when my little Cub Scouts came for den meetings, the pictures they colored were no longer of Pokemon or cartoon characters. Instead, they drew soldiers, blowing up terrorists, killing Osama bin Laden. Their innocence stolen.
Every morning on 9/11, I find myself, once again, in front of the television set, watching, not a morning show, but the tribute ceremony, listening as the long list of names is read, unable to stop watching.
Yes, there is a long list of stories I have on my to-do list to write today. But, really, today, just as on that deceptively sunny morning 13 years ago, there is only one story — the story of a tragedy that changed everything, for everyone, forever. Today, there is only 9/11. And tonight as we gather at Cochran Park in Peconic to honor the lost, families and hearts broken by loss will stand to pledge that we, as a community and as a nation, will never, ever forget.
