On a warm morning in late August 2001, I leaned against tower one’s base–the glass and steel stretched so incredibly high–and looked upwards into an endless blue sea. An African dance squad treated the morning crowd to a free exhibition. It smelled like adrenaline, exhaust and steam. The Wife suggested taking a tour to the sky deck. The line reached down the stairs and wound around most the Byzantine lobby. Put off by the crowds, I said something like, “We’ll be back in two weeks after school starts. It’ll be better. There’ll be less people then.”
A statement that rings in my ears, it’s the biggest reason I resumed writing after falling away from the habit for nearly six years. Never know what the next day might bring, and how many more there might be.
Never forget.
Septemeber 11 is the birthday of someone I worked with at the time. And instead of writing “Whashisface’s B-day” on our department calendar, he had written “National Holiday, Everyone Celebrate.” Which of course, did not come to pass. At some point during the day, he realized what he had written, most likely months earlier, and completely obliterated it.
At least he realized the oversight. Far worse to never get the point at all.
Thanks for posting that, Sam.
A lot of us folks from “our neck of the woods” there lost someone we knew that day.
. . . and all of us there lost our innocence, even the most hardened and “streetwise” among us . . .
I’ll never know the horrors of seeing the events unfold in real-time. And I wish you didn’t either.