We were asleep in bed when the phone rang with a call from my mother at 6 a.m. Pacific time. Being an early bird, she had turned on the morning news and was in a panic because she thought our son worked in the World Trade Center. We were able to assure her he worked in the building next door, but that didn't mean he was out of danger.
So we turned on the TV and followed the various reports and fielded phone calls from the family.
Nobody on the East Coast really knew anything concrete until our son finally called from his brother-in-law's office uptown.
Our son was fine. When they were told to evacuate, he ran uptown to BIL's office. The whole area was in a panic (as you can see by the newscast images.) We told him what the news was saying and that it was planes fully loaded with passengers and aviation fuel. That was the real horror of it. No one had ever done that before.
We asked him what he had seen. He said he had gotten into work early (banker's hours, you know) and had just bought coffee at Starbucks by the WTC. He was sitting at his desk by his windows facing the WTC when things began falling from the sky. They didn't really hear an explosion because the first airplane hit many floors above where he was in the building next door. At first they didn't understand what they were seeing and then they did.
Also Deutchebank across the street was on fire from the debris spray. His Navy training took over and he got out of there fast, much to the relief of the whole family.
Almost as bad was the blackout a little over two years later. Everyone in New York wondered if it was another attack. Even the cell phone towers weren't working. He called us then from a pay phone by the Brooklyn Bridge and asked if it was another attack. We were able to tell him no, that it was just a power grid failure. Buses and trains were out and he had to hike miles to get home. Thank goodness for a quiet few years recently.
Almost worse for us was the airplane into the Pentagon, because we had worked there. No one we knew was killed then.
It is so easy to ignite and inflame a devastating political fire and not know how to put it out.
Remembering 9/11
Artemis
