story1264.xml

story1264.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-08-19

I was livng and working in NYC on September 11. My story is not particulalrly interesting or dramatic, but I think its typical of what New Yorkers experienced on that day.

At 8:45 am that day, I was voting in the NYC primary election at my polling station, an elemantary school on 82nd street between 1st and 2nd. After that, I got on the downtown Second Avenue bus on the way to my job as an attorney at law firm with an office on 59th and Lexington.

On the to work, the driver announced that the bus would terminate at 14th street because of disaster downtown. I recalled that I had seen two fire trucks moving quickly down Second Avenue when I was wating for the bus. I didn't think much of it. My stop was well before 14th Street.

As I got off the bus, a young man (or younger than me; he looked to be about 20 and I was then 31) told me that a plane had crashed into the WTC. I noticed that he had walk man and assumed he heard it on the radio. Puzzlingly, he said, "I'm going down there to check it out." I didn't (and still don't) understand the need to gawk.

As I walked to the two or three avenues to my office building, I finally noticed the brilliant blue sky that day. It was a sight to behold. There was not a cloud in the sky. It was a blue like the UNC Tar Heals (at team I've always hated because I went to UVA), wear on their road baketball jerseys. It was a magnificent. I stopped to look at it and after a few moments I caught myself wasting time. I was late for work.

When I got my office building, I saw two of the secretaries having a smoke break. I asked them if they had heard the news, and one of them, a gruff but sort of lovable woman named Paula said, "two of them crashed into the Trade Center."

When I walked into the office, I saw the cute, young receptionist (who insisted that she was really a singer) crying. She had just started at my firm after temping at an office in the WTC. She was hysterical. I told her that a plane once crashed into the Empire State Building and the only thing that was really damaged was the plane. I told her not to worry. Obviously, I've never been so wrong.

I went down the hall and down the flight of stairs to my office. Its maybe a hundred paces, but my walk was interrupted four or five different colleages with the latest reports. A car bomb exploded outside the state department, another plan was seen circling Washington, DC, five more planes are off course and unaccounted for.

I was curious to see the WTC. I tried to get on the Internet, but the obvious news cites were jammed. No access to CNN, MSNBC, NYT, etc. Then I remembered that I had a New Mexico paper on my favorites list. A few weeks earlier I had bookmarked the site. It was part of a revery of quitting my job and moving west. I clicked on the site and it worked. I guess the west was still asleep.

I could not believe it. It was true. Seeing it made it seem less true. Odd, but that's how I felt. The fire ball in the picture looked so extreme that I had a hard time believing it. I wasn't scared. I was too stunned to be scared.

I didn't know what to do. I had a brief due later that week and I started to work on it. Days later, I would look back on that decision to start my job that day and wonder. What if I had been in the second building to be hit and been told to stay at my desk. I was something of a workaholic then. I probably would have stayed and worked. Its a scarey thought and one that has not been far from my mind since then.

After about fifteen minutes of working, I realized that I should call my mother. She is a world class worrier and I figured she would be scared. I decided to call my father first and make sure he was ok. I wasn't really worried about him. His office was on 44th Street near Grand Central and he rarely had a reason to go downtown. Before I made the call, my dad called me. I don't know how I missed the call, but he was routed to voice mail. His message said that he couldn't get through to my mom, but knew she would be worried. He called me to tell me he was ok. He was at a seminar at the Sheraton in mid-town and planned to finish the class (which was scheduled for all day).

I called my mother at her job and told her I was ok. She had access to a television at work and told me it was incredible. I told her about my message from Dad. I insisted that everything would be ok. I still believed it.

After the call, I decided to turn on the radio in my office. It was a clunky clock radio that I had put in my office the previous October to listen to the baseball playoffs when I worked at night. I heard the newscaster describe the collapse of the first tower to fall. What I remember most is that he said, at first, that the front of the top of the building was falling. For a few moments I was oddly relieved that whatever bad was going to happen, this was it and it wasn't so bad. The moment passed and I had never been more wrong. My second extreme miscalculation of the magnitude of the day's events left me numb. The whole building had collapsed.

I called my best friend David. He lived in Richmond and I was curious to see if people in other parts of the country understood what was going on. David is a very calm guy, the kind of guy who isn't rattled in a stressful situation and never gets too animated. He described the collapse of first tower to me. He wasn't animated. He just had lots of details in a way that was uncharacteristic of him. To anyone else, he would have seemed calm. But I know this guy very well. The level of detail and the desire to keep repeating the story put me off. I told him I had to go.

As I hung up the phone, a few of my co-workers said they were going to look for a TV to see what was happenning. I cannot really describe the feeling of being away from a TV for most of that morning. I felt sort of lost without connection to the world. We walked out of the builing, about five of us. I honestly cannot tell you who they were. I was sort of numb.

We didn't know where to go. Someone suggested the TV's outside the CBS studio on 59th and 5th. There's no sound there so we panned that idea. We wound up at the dive bar called the Subway Inn on the corner of 60th and Lexington. Its a bar that is often referred to as a whole. But it was open and a crowd was milling inside. From there, I watched the second building collapse. I realized that the day was over. I've never felt that alone before in my life. There I was, in the middele of a bar with strangers, experiencing this bizarre day. I was unhappy with my career, unsatisfied with my love life, and tired of waiting for something to happen to make my life better. I'd been feeling that way for weeks and after those fleeting moments at the Subway Inn, I didn't address those issues fully in my mind for close to another year.

After the second building collapsed, I made eye contact with my colleagues and nodded that I was headed back to the office. Its about a two mimute walk and my mind turned to quickly finishing my brief and leaving early.

When I got back to the office, I was stopped by several people with various stories to tell. I guy in the mailroom was headed downtown to look for his mother. The receptionist was able to reach her friends at her old job. Another plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.

By this point, time had stopped having meaning. I usually don't wear a watch because I just sort of know the time. A good friend calls me the Rainman of Time. At some point, before noon I think, I was told by someone that our office was closing. I walked around for a while, offerred colleagues the use of my apartment, and finally decided to leave. As I gathered the computer files, papers, and other materials necessary for the completion of my brief at home, a secretary in my office came in my office. She was something of the office lune. She was a busy body and often inflcted colleagues with too much information about her personal life (usually about how broke she was). She was in a panic because she needed to pick up her son at school and the subways were not running, and she had no money. I gave her all of the money in my wallet. 80 bucks. I didn't think much of it at the time. She later told me it was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for her.

Before I left, I left a voicemail for my father at his job. I told him my address and that I was going to be there. I suggested he meet me there b/c I had heard that the trains were not running to NJ where he lives with my mother.

As I left the office, my mind went blank. I walked along the Avenues to my apartment on the Upper East Side. I was struck by how quiet everything was. People were calmly heading north. I saw long lines at payphones, but no one was arguing. People were talkative, even jovial. There was a spirit of comadarderie. I remember thinking that this is what I've always liked avout being a New Yorker. We're a little gruff, but we're a friendly and kind group. I looked south and saw that the line of people seemed to go on forever. For the first time I noticed the smoke rising from Downtown. I wondered if the smoke had been visible before the buildings collapsed or when I was in line waiting for the bus.

I don't remember much else about the walk. I stopped off at a pizza place and bought some food. I thought I might be entertaining my father. Before I made the long climb up the four flights of stairs to my five story walk up, I bought some bottled water. It was a nod to the thought that my water might somehow stop flowing from the taps. I remember thinking that if the water goes, my problems would be so bad that water would be the least of my worries.

For the rest of the day I just waited. My father never arrived. My mother kept calling me (somehow she could call me at will, but I could not call her) to ask if I had heard from him. The previous August, my father had had angioplasty. Its a routine surgery if its not your Dad (or you). My mother fretted (in a a way only a Jewish mother with too much time on her hands can do) that he must have had a heart attack. I told her not to worry. Logically I knew that my father was almost certainly safe and sound, but on that day, I no longer trusted my own sense of logic.

As the hours passed, I cleaned my apartment in anticipation of my father's arrival. I spoke on the phone to the friends I could get in touch with and generally wondered what the hell was next. I followed President Bush's quixotic dance around the country and thought to myself how the heck is this man going to respond. I was and am a fiercely partisan Democrat and my fears that he was unqualified only exaserbated my own sense that the world was spinning out of control.

As the day wore on, I started to worry about my father. It seemed like the kind of thing that might happen. He was then 67 and did have a heart condition. It was awfully hot and sunny that day and my apartment was forty blocks and across town from his seminar. I sat in front of my window overlooking 1st Avenue (between 82 and 83) and watched the endless stream of people heading north. All were calm and dotted among the throngs were a few covered in ash.

My dad finally turned up at my parents house around 5:30. My mother called me. He had headed to Penn Station when his class ended (it was not canclled or cut short) and caught a train with no problem. Apparently, the trains were running. I decided that I had been freed from my apartment and started milloing about my neighborhood. tried to give blood, but was turnded away. I met a friend for dinner and watched Bush's speach. I was pleased that everyone in a crowded restarant stopped to listen. I don't remember anything in that spech, but I do remember that everyone seemed calmed by it. I was pleased that the leader of our country was not hiding in a bunker somewhere. He was at the seat of government doing the people's business. This was as it should be I thought. I never got over my sense that he was not ready for the job. (I should note that I thought then, now and in between that the attack and quasi occupation of Afganistan as Bush directed it was exactly the right response).

Over the next few days, I fielded phone calls from old friends checkin on my status, dressed down a partner in my office who didn't seem to get that the subways had not been closed just to irritatate him, shrugged when a collague told me that another colleague lost several friends, got really drunk on the Thursday after, and finally finished my brief. An adversary who was usually uncooperative consented to an adjournment of the due date and I got it done (albeit without the use of the internet based resources which were no longer working -- and would not return foro another month or so).

I don't remember much about the days after. I seem to recall that there was some sort of wind shift on the Wednesday after and the resulting smell of smoke in my apartment caused me to call a friend who lived near the UN to see if there had been another incident.

As the days went by, I decided to switch jobs. I started the new gig on November 14th. I lasted all of seven momths. I thought that switching jobs would solve all of the problems that existed in my life before September 11. It didn't. Instead it made it worse. I went to my ten year college in reunion June and realized that major changes were needed. I need to reasssess a stressful life and find a awy to live with a little time to appreciate a beautiful sky.

A friend told me she was moving to Chapel Hill, NC to start her life anew (and enroll in graduate school). I decided, largely on the spur of the moment to join her. Left New York on July 31, 2002.

So, here I am, in the midst of all of this Carolina blue. I still cannot look at a cloudless sky and not think of that day. I am not afraid of another attack (although I recognize that another attack is inevitble). But, my life was changed. It took another eight or none months, but I now know that life isn't about getting the next brief done. It has to be about something more. I probably would have figured this out without 9/11, but livign throught that day helped me get to where I am now.