A Beautiful September Morning

I was going to post more about canvassing today and about what people are talking about, but I’m afraid that I just got distracted by a walk to Waban Center.  It’s a glorious September morning, and there’s a definite warning that cooler temps are coming soon.  However, the sun and chill mean that the sky is unusually blue.

We lived in Forest Hills, NY in September of 2001.  I was still working for a large consulting firm and had Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts as a client.  I’d been regularly commuting up to Boston to work with the client and also to start to be part of the local consulting team up here (the change that would result in us finally moving here less than two years later).  Our son was three years old and had just started daycare.  My wife worked for a division of Reuters, and managed a good deal of the IT systems responsible for the firm’s financial activities on Wall Street.

I had a noon meeting scheduled for Landmark Center in Fenway on September 11 and hence was booked on the 8:35am Delta Shuttle from LGA to BOS, but things were running a little behind schedule (it being LaGuardia, after all).  Hence, we were still third in line on the tarmac when the ground stop warning came through.  We were given very little information on the plane, but then no one had a lot of information to give.  All we knew was that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, probably a Cessna with a pilot who had gotten disoriented or had a heart attack.

After a few minutes, the pilots got word that the flight would not be leaving anytime soon and we turned back to the terminal.  What had been a bustling center was very quiet, and all of the TV’s in the terminal had been turned off.  There was a Bloomberg terminal there (remember those?) and a crowd four deep was trying to get information for this one source.

I decided to grab a cab (still not knowing what was going on) to try to get into Manhattan and my office to do my noon meeting via phone.  There were no cabs however.  Finally one came after about 20 minutes and I shared it with two Germans who were trying to get back to their hotel in mid-town and a young man who was trying to get home to his wife at their apartment at Battery Park City – across the street from the World Trade Center.

We never got to Manhattan as the island was completely sealed off.  Instead we stopped in the line of unmoving cars, eventually getting to the Triboro bridge were we watched and listened to newsradio as the first of the towers fell.

All this time, my wife was unable to reach me on my cell, or for me to reach her on mine.  Instead all she was hearing was that a plane – either from or going to Boston – had hit the WTC with the loss of all aboard.  She also knew that her boss, friend, and mentor was at a technology conference at Windows on the World.  However she also had to make sure that she coordinated all of the activity taking the financial trading systems offline in such a way that the data on trades stayed intact.

My first recontact was my best friend from high school, who finally got through to me on my cell phone about 90 minutes after the first plane hit.  He had better luck calling from New Jersey than we’d had from calling inside the City.  He then called my wife, and my parents, letting them know I was alive and perfectly fine.

There were many, many others we knew who were not.

The rest of the day was spent trying to find friends and check in with those we knew were in the area.  We were able to find most, but not all.

Chris Steele is running for the city-wide office of Alderman at Large, Ward 5.  You can learn more at www.steele4newton.org or by contacting him at steelch@yahoo.com