The first thing I noticed when I woke up that morning was the sky. It was an unusual shade of blue. Not too pale. Not too dark. It was perfect. I was visiting family with my infant son, and we had planned a day of adventure in the city. Around 8:45 a.m., I began my walk to no where on the treadmill in my sister’s 35th floor apartment on the banks of the Hudson River overlooking New York City. A few minutes after I started my exercise, the local news reported that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I hopped off the moving treadmill and went into the living room where my sister was playing with my seven-month-old son. Walking over to the wall of windows, I could see smoke billowing out of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The media was still saying that it was an accident caused by a small plane, but looking at that building I knew that they were wrong. America was under attack.
A few minutes later the phone rang. It was a family member calling from outside the World Trade Center asking us if we knew why debris was falling on his head. We screamed, “Get out of there. Get out of there. Head north. Head north. It’s a terrorist attack.” Then, the line went dead. As we watched in horror at the scene unfolding outside our window, my sister screamed, “Oh my God. Oh my God. There’s a second plane.” We stood transfixed at the window, paralyzed, unable to comprehend what we were witnessing live over Manhattan. We watched as the second plane flew up the Hudson River, banked to the east, and slammed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, creating a tremendous yellow and orange fireball. We stood there, horrified, stunned, shocked. With pounding hearts and racing minds, we were worried sick over whether our family member was alive or not. And, we were heartbroken beyond words thinking of all the innocent people who had just died in those fiery crashes and of all of the families whose lives were now shattered forever.
Like so many that day, we waited. And, we waited. And, we waited. No word. No phone call. It was almost impossible to get a call through because the cellular system was overloaded with so many people trying to do the same thing we were trying - to call loved ones. Many hours later, there was a knock on the door. There he stood, shaken but alive. We were one of the lucky ones. Yes, 20 years ago today, we were one of the lucky ones.