story4408.xml
Title
story4408.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
story
Date Entered
2002-09-11
911DA Story: Story
(I'll try this again! Hit some key too soon....)
We were at the end of a sailing trip on the western Mediterranean. Most of our fellow travelers had left for the US, they thought, the morning of the 11th. Theirs is another story. We had elected to stay a few days longer in Malta and, that afternoon, were told the horrifying news by a salesclerk in a music store. We fled back to the hotel and were glued, crying, to the TV.
The Maltese were kind and helpful. We were able to use the hotel email to email home to New Jersey to check on our NYC and Washington, DC area family and friends. A shopkeeper, hearing our accents, came out of his shop as we wandered aimlessly, asked if we were Americans and told us how sorry he was. Our little Valetta embassy had no condolence book but did have touching pictures on the walls, crayoned by children in the international school.
We were lucky, thanks to our travel agent, not to be sleeping in the airport in London when we got there on Friday. On top of that, the CEO of the Stafford Hotel did an extraordinary thing. He did not charge any of us stranded Americans for our lodgings in the days before we could get flights home! He said that his grandfather had died in World War I and his father fought in World War II. His father told him,"Never forget what the Americans have done for us twice in this century." Now, he saw his chance to try to repay that debt through the Americans in his hotel.
The memorial services in the great cathedrals; the sea of flowers, lines of people and touching notes in Grosvenor Park opposite our US embassy; the volunteers standing there with boxes of tissues; the calls that poured into the embassy from as far away as Wales, offing to drive down and take home stranded Americans......
Nothing brought it all home like getting home. Our New Jersey home county, Bergen, is a commuter county to New York City. Every town along our rail lines that connect to the tubes under the Hudson River that took the commuters to the station under the Twin Towers....every small town had lost inhabitants. Eight or nine people from a town of 2,300 is alot. Multiply that by all the small towns. If you didn't know someone, yourself, you knew someone who knew someone. It has been a year now and still the New York "Times" carries a regular page of more pictures and more vignettes....and is not finished. Real people with real lives, loves, hopes....
And every time we see the NYC skyline from our side of the river, I still cry. No matter what they build there, those of us who saw it as it was, whether we loved the Towers architecturally or not, will carry that skyline picture in our minds and hearts forever. I hope it will somehow come to almost balance the other, horrifying picture that will always reside there, too.
And every time we see the skyline of the city from our side of the river, I still cry.
We were at the end of a sailing trip on the western Mediterranean. Most of our fellow travelers had left for the US, they thought, the morning of the 11th. Theirs is another story. We had elected to stay a few days longer in Malta and, that afternoon, were told the horrifying news by a salesclerk in a music store. We fled back to the hotel and were glued, crying, to the TV.
The Maltese were kind and helpful. We were able to use the hotel email to email home to New Jersey to check on our NYC and Washington, DC area family and friends. A shopkeeper, hearing our accents, came out of his shop as we wandered aimlessly, asked if we were Americans and told us how sorry he was. Our little Valetta embassy had no condolence book but did have touching pictures on the walls, crayoned by children in the international school.
We were lucky, thanks to our travel agent, not to be sleeping in the airport in London when we got there on Friday. On top of that, the CEO of the Stafford Hotel did an extraordinary thing. He did not charge any of us stranded Americans for our lodgings in the days before we could get flights home! He said that his grandfather had died in World War I and his father fought in World War II. His father told him,"Never forget what the Americans have done for us twice in this century." Now, he saw his chance to try to repay that debt through the Americans in his hotel.
The memorial services in the great cathedrals; the sea of flowers, lines of people and touching notes in Grosvenor Park opposite our US embassy; the volunteers standing there with boxes of tissues; the calls that poured into the embassy from as far away as Wales, offing to drive down and take home stranded Americans......
Nothing brought it all home like getting home. Our New Jersey home county, Bergen, is a commuter county to New York City. Every town along our rail lines that connect to the tubes under the Hudson River that took the commuters to the station under the Twin Towers....every small town had lost inhabitants. Eight or nine people from a town of 2,300 is alot. Multiply that by all the small towns. If you didn't know someone, yourself, you knew someone who knew someone. It has been a year now and still the New York "Times" carries a regular page of more pictures and more vignettes....and is not finished. Real people with real lives, loves, hopes....
And every time we see the NYC skyline from our side of the river, I still cry. No matter what they build there, those of us who saw it as it was, whether we loved the Towers architecturally or not, will carry that skyline picture in our minds and hearts forever. I hope it will somehow come to almost balance the other, horrifying picture that will always reside there, too.
And every time we see the skyline of the city from our side of the river, I still cry.
Collection
Citation
“story4408.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed December 25, 2025, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/13564.