[EDITOR'S NOTE: We first wrote this blog on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.] Everyone on earth knows this Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Where were you on that day? We’d like to know.
I remember sitting at my desk reading the headlines on CNN.com. The big news of the morning was the possibility that Michael Jordan would return to play for the Washington Wizards. I typically kept CNN.com up throughout the day, but for whatever reason, clicked off the site.
Shortly after, one of our salespeople came to work and told me he’d heard about “a small plane” hitting a building in New York. Sounded like a terrible, but understandable accident.
The news turned out to be anything but understandable. Good luck getting back on CNN.com – I think this might have been back in my dial-up AOL modem days. Luckily, I had a radio.
I don’t think we got much done that morning at work; at some point, I received a call from my son’s school that it was closing so I left the office to get him. My son was 8 at the time, going to a grade school on the near-Southside of Chicago – a haul from where I worked.
However, the streets, even through downtown Chicago, were practically empty. I heard on the car radio how the towers collapsed, but seeing them peel away later on TV is the image I’ll remember the most. Modern steel buildings just aren’t supposed to do that.
Meanwhile, I and many of my colleagues had tickets to fly to Reno on the 12th for a trade show. Naturally, no one flew anywhere. The show, however, did go on in a fashion since many people, particularly the speakers for the first day, were already there ... and weren’t heading home soon enough.
We later learned that a new employee of the trade association putting on the Reno show – barely a few months on the job – was on her way to the show on the plane that hit the Pentagon. The single mother left behind a son who must be in college by now.
I also had another business friend who was actually in the air departing from LaGuardia early on the morning of 9/11 heading to Ixtapa for her honeymoon. She and her husband landed in Houston for a scheduled stop.
Upon arrival, a flight attendant announced that all planes were grounded. At first, even after hearing her mom scream over the phone ecstatic that she was safe, but still frightened since she couldn’t reach her other daughter going to NYU, even then, my friend didn’t think it could be such a big deal.
She walked into the terminal just in time to see the second tower fall.
“I knew in my heart who had done it,” she wrote me last week. “I’m pretty much agnostic, not a Muslim, but I’m very much an Arab. My home was being attacked by people who came from the same part of the world as me, by people who spoke the same language I speak with my family.”
They stayed put in an unlikely honeymoon destination, and found out a week later, that a good friend was killed while at her office on the 102nd floor of one of the towers.
My final memory was learning that the daughter of another trade association executive gave birth to a son that morning. “We would take turns going to her room to be with her,” he wrote me last week. “The TV was turned off in her room. It was hard to keep the nurses and doctors focused on their jobs.” Happy 10th birthday, Malachi.
