September 11th
It’s Saturday morning, September 11, 2021. I am going to write this with minimal editing and spell-checking. Apologies in advance for any errors.
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For some reason, at the end of the summer of 2001, I connected, 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 Labor Day weekend, 2001. I arrived at Newark Airport, and the strangest thing happened. All the arrival and departure boards in the airport were not working. I had no idea when or where she would be landing.
At that time, you could still walk all the way to the terminal door to greet your arriving guest. I had no idea where she was. We had not met in person, and I 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 met.
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 had given everyone back home my name, address, and phone number and told them that if anything ever happened to her, I was the one who made her disappear.
The wedding vows wrote themselves.
That Labor Day Monday, we headed into the city. Not being much of a planner, I did not realize that almost every restaurant was closed (except maybe Friday’s). So we just walked around.
After a while, we found ourselves at the World Trade Center. It was also closed for business, but the front doors were open. We went inside.
It was eerily quiet as we walked through the lobby and explored one or two levels above. There was no one there. As far as I could tell, we were the only two people in the building. Only in hindsight did 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 were vendors selling T-shirts on the street. I bought three, one for each of my kids, with a picture of the Twin Towers on the back.
A few days later, she flew back to Florida, only to return the following week. On September 10th, she had to take a few days of training in Washington, D.C. the next day. So, on the morning of Tuesday, September 11th, she headed to her training, and I headed to work.
On the way to work, I listened to Howard Stern. They were making jokes about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. At that point, they thought it might have been some small, single-engine plane. However, by the time I got to work, everyone knew what had happened.
Once at work, people were huddled in conference rooms or down in the cafeteria watching the news. It was then that the second plane hit. After a while, the first tower collapsed. When the second tower collapsed, I thought it was a replay of the first tower.
It wasn’t.
Minutes later, I left and went to pick up my kids at their school. They were standing outside, not sure what was going on.
The skies were quiet.
Later that day, my Florida friend (sadly, I cannot, for the life of me, remember her name) returned. After the Pentagon was hit, everything had shut down, and she came back 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 on the phone one day and, as a joke, said, “What are you doing, rearranging my kitchen?”
She replied, “Yes.”
After a while (I don’t remember how long flights were grounded), flights finally became available, so she booked her trip back to Florida.
On the drive to the airport, there was still a steady stream of black smoke hanging over New York, where the Twin Towers had once stood.
Inside the airport, people were everywhere. They waited to check in and to board their flights. There were hundreds of cots for people who had been there for days, stranded, with no place to go and nothing to do but wait.
Armed soldiers paced through the airport.
And above all of this, there was nothing but silence.
After she successfully boarded her plane and the flight took off, I started talking to a young man. He had been stranded in the airport since the attack. It turned out that he had a television show on some random cable network featuring stories about him, 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’m sure we all did.
Photo by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash
