It’s Saturday morning, September 11th 2021. I am going to write this with minimal editing and spell check. Apologies in advance for any errors.
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For someone reason, at the end of the summer of two-thousand-and-one I connect, via an online dating site, with a woman from Florida. After many phone calls and emails, she decided to fly up to meet me. It was the weekend of Labor Day, 2001. I arrived at Newark Airport, and the strangest thing happened. All the Arrival/Departure boards in the airport were not working. I had no idea when and where she would be landing. At this time, you could still walk all the way to the terminal door to greet your arriving guest, but had no idea where she was. We had not met in person, and only had her online dating profile to guide me, and we all know how unreliable those photos can be...after a while, as I roamed from terminal to terminal, we meet.
I made a joke that if I didn’t find her, and anything happened to her, I would be in a lot of trouble. She assured me that she gave everyone back home my name, address, phone number and to let them know if anything every happened to her, I was the one who made her disappear.
The wedding vows write themselves.
That Labor Day Monday we head into the city. Me, not being the planner that I am, does not realize that most every restaurant are closed (except for maybe FRIDAYS) so we just walk around. After a time we found ourselves at the World Trade Center. It is also closed for business, but the front doors are open. We go inside. It was eerily quiet as we walked throughout the lobby and explored one or two levels above. There is no one there; we are the only two people within the building. Only in hindsight, do I realize how ominous this was. We laughed and ran around the empty building like children, unaware that eight days from that moment, people would be going through a living hell in that very spot.
On the way out there are vendors selling t-shirts on the street; I buy three, one for each of my kids with a picture of the Twin Towers on the back.
A few days later she flies back to Florida, only to return the following week, September 10th because she has to take a few days of training in Washington D.C., so on the morning of Tuesday, September 11th she heads to Washington, and I head to work.
On the way to work, listen to Howard Stern they make jokes about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. At that point they thought it might be some single engine plane, but by the time I get to work, everyone knew what happened.
People are huddled in conference rooms or down in the cafeteria watching the news. Its then that the second plane hits. After a while the first tower collapses. When the second tower collapsed, I thought it was a reply of the first tower.
It wasn’t.
Minutes later I leave and go to pick up my kids at their school. They are standing outside, not sure what was going on.
The skies are quiet.
Later that day my Florida friend (sadly, I can not for the life of me remember her name) returns. After the Pentagon was hit, everything shut down, and she returned to my house.
For the next five days she stayed at my house, which was unusual since we really didn’t know each other that well.
That was remedied over time.
I went back to work. I spoke to her one day on the phone, and as a joke said, “What are doing re-arranging my kitchen?”
She replied, “Yes”.
After awhile (I don’t remember how long flights were grounded), there were finally flights available, so she booked her trip back to Florida.
On the drive to the airport, the sky over New York, where the Twin Towers once stood, there was still a steady stream of black smoke.
Inside the airport, people are everywhere, they wait to process tickets, wait to board their flights. Their are hundreds of cots, people that have been there for days, stranded, no place to go, nothing to do but wait. Armed soldiers pace throughout.
And above all this, there is nothing but silence.
After she successfully boarded and her flight took off, I started to talk to a young man that had been stranded in the airport since the attack. Turns out, he had a television show on some random cable network, stories about him and his dog, and their travel adventures. I told him I had room at my house if he wanted a better place to stay. He thanked me, but declined.
I’m sure when all was said and done he had a hell of a story to tell.
I sure we all did...
Photo by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash
