On Sept. 11, 2001, I was in Florida, getting ready to take a copy editing test at the Miami Herald. A friend called to tell me to turn on the TV. I watched the coverage of the first plane hitting. There was still a moment—about 17 minutes’ worth—when people were shaken but thought it’s a small plane, it’s a freak accident. Then the second plane hit, and we all knew the truth at once.
My then-fiance’s mother and my uncle both worked in New York. We heard from her early, that she was OK, and that was the last word for hours. My uncle wasn’t in the city that day. I was on the phone with him when the first tower collapsed. I don’t remember what I said. The second tower went down soon after.
I tried to reschedule with the Herald, but they assured me that it was fine, I could still come in. I’d been looking for a job for months. Numbly, on autopilot, I drove into Miami and took the test. I didn’t get the job.
My fiance’s mother worked a few buildings over from the World Trade Center. She’d also been in the city during the 1993 attempted bombing, so she refused to go back to her desk after the first plane hit. Yes, some office workers were told to go back to their desks. She managed to get on one of the last ferries out of New York before mass transit shut down. We didn’t know that for a few hours because the phone lines also went down. Everyone we knew called us, asking if she was OK, and we didn’t have an answer until she got through to us much later.
Meanwhile my former colleagues at The Record—who would become my colleagues again after I returned to the newsroom a few years later, because Florida living wasn’t for us—were in and around New York, covering the news. One of them took this photo. You’ve probably seen it. It was all over North Jersey afterward. I remember someone had painted it on a shed by their house.
My fiance’s Floridian co-workers were mystified. They thought the WTC was a tourist attraction and not office space. They thought no one in the city would be at work that early. Wrong and wrong.
When, a few months later, I heard a radio DJ plaintively ask if it was OK yet to hate New York again, I felt a flare of anger.
A lot of people in New Jersey commute to New York for work. I did it. My fiance-now-husband did it. There are 9/11 memorials all over North Jersey, large and small, because so many towns in the area lost people.
I listen to the recitation of names at Ground Zero every year, but otherwise I try to avoid 9/11 remembrances. I don’t watch the news footage from that day. Seeing it the first time was enough. But it’s been 25 years and our kids have grown up in the world that came afterward. I wish we’d had a better world to give them.
A lot of things changed that day, mostly for the worse. I remember all the posted MISSING signs of people who probably never came home. But I also remember American flags everywhere. I remember the stories of people helping each other, running toward the danger instead of away. I remember a bruised, defiant sense of unity.
We seem so far from that. We should try to get back there.
