MY 9/11 MEMORIES

Google photo

Sunday, 8:30 AM.  60 degrees F at the ferry dock, 54 on the back porch.  Wind S, calm with light gusts.  The sky is overcast and cloudy, the humidity 80%.  The barometer is plunging, but still high at 30.01", predicting the possibility of showers tomorrow, then clearing and cooler.
    The Islamic terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 is one of those iconic events, like Pearl Harbor or the assassination of President Kennedy, that will always be keenly recalled by any American alive at the time.  My own memory of that infamous event is quite vivid, although I was a thousand miles away.
   That fateful morning I was fishing on Pikes Creek a mile from home.  We had retired to Bayfield only a year before, after a long professional career that included years of working in New York.
I was just leaving the stream, still in my waders, when the driver of a car in the parking lot rolled down his window and asked if I had heard the news about an airliner hitting one of the Twin Towers in New York.
  There was a beautiful,  clear blue sky above us, and I could picture a pilot flying up the Hudson River to show the World Trade Center to visitors flying into LaGuardia, which I had experienced many times; something must have gone terribly wrong, I conjectured, as I drove the short distance home.
   When I got there the television was already on.  Our daughter Eva had called from Denver to worriedly ask Joan if I was in New York, as I had recently been doing some consulting there.  Satisfied that I was out fishing, she was no longer on the phone, but yet another thousand miles away. Bad news does indeed travel fast.  By that time the second plane had hit Tower Two, and it was obvious we were under attack. As the proud structures crumpled to a heap of smoking rubble we began to realize the enormity of the crime.
   As we watched the unfolding drama, I remembered being in meetings in the Twin Towers, and how one could feel them sway. ever so gently, in a strong wind.  They would never bravely face a gale again. I recalled too how beautifully they had gleamed in the setting sun, symbols of a great city and its culture.
   As the death toll mounted, we realized that if we still lived there, we would be mourning friends and neighbors, or perhaps my family would be mourning me.  As the stories of the resilience and bravery of cops, firefighters and ordinary citizens unfolded, we felt proud that we had once been one of them: New Yorkers!
   And finally we knew that they, and all of us, could take the hit, pick ourselves up, fight back and win.

Postscript: any NFL football players who choose not to stand today during the National Anthem will prove themselves the overpaid, self-centered louts we have always suspected them to be, and unfit to don any other American uniform.