9-11-17

I have maybe told this story before, but I always feel the need to tell it on 9-11.
     The Day was sunny and warm seventeen years ago. I don't remember what I was wearing, or even if I needed a jacket, but I remember it was a sunny day and I guess it was warm enough to not be remembered.
     I worked for Consolidated Dairies in a job that supplied me with a good salary, benefits and freedom to do pretty much what I wanted to do as long as I showed results and in 2001 the milk business was fun and easy. I headed down to Park Ridge New Jersey to a golf course run by a father and daughter who'd won a bid every few years to run it. I don't know if they had a problem or not. On my way back toward New York, driving on Livingston Ave,. Teri calls me and tells me a plane hit the World Trade Center. I remember back when a plane had hit the Empire State building and thought the same thing had happened. I make a remark to Teri in that vein and head for my Mother's house to see what is going on. When I put the TV on there is smoke pouring out of one tower and I am surprised at how bad it is. I'd expected it to be a small sightseeing plane or something. As I am watching, out of the corner of my eye the second plane hits and I can't believe what I'd just witnessed. Those things don't happen. I start thinking it must be terrorists doing it. I sit down on the couch and didn't get up for most of the rest of the day.
     The next thing I know and I don't remember how far after the first two planes hit reports start to filter into the newsroom about a plane hitting the Pentagon and a plane crashing into a field in Pennsylvania. It felt like we were under attack and we were.
     Several hours into the disaster one of the towers falls. I'm staring at the screen yelling at it, repeatedly asking, "What just happened!"
     The talking heads on the TV take a few moments to notice it and then make the statement, "It looks like The World Trade Center Tower number two has fallen." I commend them for their professionalism, but at a time like this a bland delivery of that line didn't seem to match what was needed. It didn't encompassed the gravity of the situation. Not since the war of 1812 had a war reached our shores. And not since the attack on Pearl Harbor had a nation been so appalled and enraged to go to war, but how should we fight and where? Those questions would be answered in the future and some of the answers would be wrong and we would have to fight battles that should have never been fought, but that was for later. Now one of the towers had fallen and the other they were talking that it might fall too. I'd seen the first go, I couldn't believe the second would go too, but then it went and the plume of smoke and dust it sent out was just like the first and for a moment the lower half of Manhattan disappeared again.
     Afterwards I remember a reporter slightly staggering around downtown saying I don't know if I am being picked up, but I will continue reporting, which he did. He went on and on about what was going on in downtown and there were picture after picture of dust encrusted men and women walking north toward safety.
     The Camera shot would change to somewhere on the west side of Manhattan, up town where the dust hadn't reached and police and firefighters were setting up for the big rescue from the world Trade Center. Hospitals all around were preparing to receive the expected hundreds of injured. I remember few if any people were pulled out from the  rubble.
     All of these years later I think people who witnessed things like the assassination of JFK or Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King or the attack on Pearl Harbor most of felt the way I do each year. For People who were alive when it happened it will never be just history.