Sept 11th again

There was a somewhat eerie similarity to my commute this morning. It was Tuesday, I was off to work to drive umpteen miles on 290 and 495 with the other commuter lemmings. It was early September, typical midweek grind to follow. If it had been a bright blue sky it would have been too familiar.

The morning of Sept 11, 2001 (a Tuesday) I was listening to some talk radio as I usually do and downing my travel mug of coffee to get the brain cells firing. I think I was flipping between WEEI (sports/politics) and WAAF (adolescent humor). Callaghan usually gets me going a bit with his right-wing bomb tossing and the Hillman with his lowbrow self-promoting humor. Around 845 word came a plane had hit the Trade Center. A flash of "uh oh" crossed my mind for an instant but was replaced with a more reasoned response such as "probably a Cessna, private aircraft, the kind most likely to crash". I was almost at work and stuck in a bit of traffic off the 290 exit when word of a fire on the middle/upper floors had started.

As I arrived at work, news of the second plane hitting had come in and by now, folks were gathering around one of the CNN video feeds on the web. The website would soon become unresponsive as the server buckled under a barrage of requests, being an early adopter of live video on the web. Many of the folks I was working with were from the tri-state area (NY/NJ/Connecticut), former employees of Tellabs. A few became very concerned and lived on the phone that morning, and later left from distraction, as at least 3 had family members working in the towers. None were lost from that group as far as I know.

The next days or weeks kind of blend in now, mostly a barrage of images of the fiery collapsing structure and nervous politicians. It kind of sent me into a work cocoon to some degree which is one way to cope. I do remember the beautiful blue of a September sky without jets. We must have been in the flight path at work because I always looked up and noticed trails in the morning on blue-sky days.

Years and two companies later I learned that at my current employer, a coworker acquaintance lost his fiance that day on the first plane. He's a really nice guy but at 40-something has never married, although not for lack of interest in fact he's somewhat of a ladies man. As I understand it's the closest he's come to it, he was finally ready. He's still single. Some of the damage done that day continues to this one ....

On the other side of it I was to become a father within the year, which was a truly miraculous experience. I often wonder how I'll communicate life before 9-11 to my son. He is a generation that will never know the same sense of naivety and innocence we did before that day. There's a pall of anxiety and concern that was created that we still live under to this day. It's certainly our generation's Kennedy assassination and it might take that long to recover our national sense of safety and confidence in some ways.