Last year, Phil posted his memories of the day itself. Here are mine.
I had crawled aboard the Capitol Corridor train at the Davis station a bit after 5 am that morning, and as usual had promptly fallen asleep, just like the rest of the passengers. I awoke shortly before we glided into the Emeryville station two hours later, in time to hear the conductor announce that he’d heard on the radio that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. “Strange things going on this morning, folks,” he said. “Be careful.”
The driver of the Amtrak bus tried to keep us blissfully in the dark by playing his usual Barry White while shuttling us across the Bay. We convinced him otherwise. We heard about the first tower’s collapse as we started across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. A few of us looked at each other and started watching the skies as the bus crept across the landmark.
When I arrived in the office, our Assistant Sales Director (salespeople were always the first ones to arrive at work) was white-faced with worry. A team of our salespeople were scheduled to meet with Cantor Fitzgerald that morning at 9 –Â had they been in the building? (They were not, we later learned, having seen the first plane hit on their way to the meeting.) Somebody muttered about “that bin Laden guy,” and I wondered if instead it was someone linked to Arafat’s old 1970s Black September terror group. We had no video, only radio and Internet news to tell us what was happening.
Shortly, the EVP of Sales directed that everyone should go home. I called my fiancee and told her I was coming back. Three hours later, my fiancee and stepdaughter were sitting numbly in our family room in Davis, watching the reruns of the towers falling. It was then, seeing the events for the first time that day, learning about United 93, that I finally allowed myself to have a “there but for the grace of God…” moment — because of what had happened in my life the week before.
The week before 9/11, I had flown in to JFK for my first visit to NY. It was a business trip to the head office of the dot-com I worked for at the time. My wife and I were not yet married, and I came up with the idea of staying past Friday and having her fly out so we could have a weekend, or more preferably three days, together in Manhattan. What she wouldn’t know was that I planned to propose to her at either Windows on the World, the restaurant in the north tower, or, if we couldn’t get reservations, at the observation deck atop the south tower. (I had always said I’d propose to her atop Mount Shasta, but the Towers seemed an excellent substitute.)
What stopped me was that I didn’t have a ring.
Little did I know that I had but to ask my grandmother and she would have gladly given me her ring to use. (Eventually, we did use it, but that’s another story).
Had my wife accompanied me on that first trip, we would likely have made sure to have a three-day weekend, Saturday thru Monday (which wouldn’t have been a problem with the office if I’d made it clear I was going to be proposing). Of course, that would have put us on United Flight 93 coming home on Tuesday morning.
In any event, flying back to San Francisco that Friday night, I had been determined that sooner rather than later, I would return to New York with my fiancee — so much so that I had passed up an opportunity on this trip to visit the World Trade Center, because I knew it would be there for us when we returned.
Instead, on 9/11, I sat with my family and carefully placed the two oversized, rectangular WTC postcards I’d brought back from New York on the glass-topped family room table. They made two tower-shaped voids in the reflected images from the TV.
After a while, I took out the old American Flag I’d received at my Eagle Scout Court of Honor — the one that had briefly flown over the Capitol — and hung it, correctly, in the front window.
Within a week, it would be joined by a Gadsden Flag.
Thank you for that, David.