September 11, 2001 approximately 8:45am – What a beautiful morning it was. I remember doing as was my custom back then; I turned on the little portable TV that sat atop our refrigerator. Poured myself a cup of coffee and went to sit on my deck while I drank my morning mud. I left the TV tuned to the Today Show as I sat there surveying my domain as it was. The neighborhood kids were in school and since it was still cool the air conditioners weren’t droning. All was quiet. My wife’s gardens were blooming with fall flowers. Our miniature rose bushes on either side of the yard were going like gang busters. They would continue to bloom until Thanksgiving that year.

With the kids occupied until 2:30 in the afternoon I was wondering, “What can I get into on this gorgeous day?” I went back inside to fill my mug. It had already begun. The first plane had hit the North Tower 1 World Trade Center. I stood there with my mouth open, shocked, aghast, the damage was huge. How many people have died I thought. Then as I stared at the images of the smoke and flames emanating from the burning building the second plane struck 2 World Trade Center, the South Tower. Accident had just been ruled out. America was under attack but by whom?

Shortly after 9:30 the third plane struck the Pentagon. I knew this was going to be a day like no other in my life, more emotional than even the assassinations. My post-polio has a weird effect on my muscles, when adrenaline flows I begin to shake. I called a friend that lives nearby to see if she had any pot around because I knew it would stop my shaking. She did but asked that I wait until her kids were down for their morning nap, which I did.

A little before 10:00 I left for the trip of less than a mile to my friend’s house. I listened on the radio as the news of the first tower collapsing came in. I ran into her house, to see for myself if it was true. I mean after all how could that be possible? How could one of these massive skyscrapers collapse? As I watched the replay, all I could hear in my head was that reporter so many years ago when the Hindenburg had exploded, “Oh, the humanity!” It so eclipsed watching Lee Harvey Oswald being shot in the basement of a Dallas police station. That was the death of one person, and an assassin at that. How many people did I just watch die.

I hurried home with what, even then, I had grown to consider medicine. I was barely safe back at home when I saw the North Tower fall. In the horror that was the collapse of Tower 2 the South Tower, mentally I had barely taken notice of the news of Flight 93 crashing headlong in to that field in Shanksville, Pa.

As the hours continued to drag on, the news continued. Every plane in America was being ordered to land immediately. What an incredible task that was. Sometime later I saw a time lapse of air traffic control radar that showed all those dots, each a plane in the air. In short order there were no more dots, no planes were flying.

By lunch time I had begun to think I want my children home with me. As high school students they were old enough to comprehend the enormity of what was happening. Today I don’t remember how I had heard that Anne Arundel County Schools was asking parents not to come and pull students out of school. They feared that if that happened, the kids who could not be allowed to leave because there was no one home would be even more panicked. I think only because I could look out our bedroom windows and see the school and know that all was OK there that I did as they asked.

All day the video showed over and over again. I actually used the “favorites” button on the TV remote for the first time so I could flip from NBC to CBS to ABC to CNN and MSNBC. (Even that day FoxNews was persona non grata on my TV) All the anchor people were overwhelmed. I am sure they were constantly asking themselves, “Who do I throw it to next?” From unfounded theories as to the perpetrators, rumors of more attacks, The Sears Tower, the State Dept., and the National Mall all were subjects of unfounded rumors of additional attacks. And those continuing images that came so quickly, like the video of the debris cloud as it rushed down the streets nearby, people walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty with the smoke from Ground Zero rising up behind them.

One of those images still chokes me up today as I write this. It is the image of doctors and nurses outside a hospital, gurneys at the ready waiting to receive survivors. Survivors who surely were going to be horribly injured, survivors that never came. They were so few.

By early in the morning terrorism experts were telling us that there was only one group capable of this attack, Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terror network. To their credit there were some experts who were cautioning not to jump to conclusions. After all we had already been through two significant terror attacks under President Clinton. The first was bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda, the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. While that was devastating but it was soon eclipsed in devastation by Timothy McVeigh’s attack on the Murrow Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Mo. So, home grown terrorists couldn’t be ruled out of hand.

It was sometime after lunch that I realized that I knew someone in the area of destruction. A young woman who had worked with me, the daughter of my employer, had recently moved to New York. I grabbed the phone and called her mother to check on her. There was no answer so I could only leave a message. It wasn’t until much later that she finally returned my call. She knew nothing; the phone system was still overloaded. While I was viewing this tragedy from one viewpoint she was living through the hell of not knowing whether her oldest child was alive or dead. I would later learn that she was just a few blocks away when the attacks began, on her way to work nearby the World Trade Center. But she was alive.

Carol had been allowed to come home early that terrible day. Consequently we gathered for dinner early. No cooking dinner that night, just soup & sandwiches. We always watch the evening news while eating dinner so 9/11 was no different. We sat there eating dinner, for Carol and I it was more liking choking dinner down as we were filled with worry about how this would change our children’s lives. Then in disbelief we watched 7 World Trade Center collapse becoming even more burning rubble where once there had stood the jewels of the New York City skyline.

On the evening of the eleventh the sound of silence became very real. Sitting on our stoop there was not a sound, no children out play, no planes on their way to BWI, no cars hurrying here and there, just church-like silence.

After dinner we were joined by a neighbor for a while in the basement of our townhome. After all, that was where the bigger TV was. We sat and talked and in a foreshadowing of what was to come, this woman who we consider a friend commented that she wouldn’t be buying gas from that towel head Muslim on the corner. The problem with her bigotry, more than the bigotry itself was this. The man who owned that gas station was Sikh from India.

It was about this time that members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans gathered on the steps of the United States Capital which we would learn in the days to come had been saved by those regular citizens on Flight 93. In unison they sang “America the Beautiful.”

Late in the evening, word came that survivor Port Authority Police Officer Phil Jimeno had finally been freed. Somehow the next day two more survivors were pulled from “The Pile.”

In the days to come I would learn that an “online” friend whose husband was a member of FDNY was luckily out of the country. They were on vacation in Greece. It was more than a week before they could get back. When they did, he did as you would expect, he went to “The Pile.” “The Pile”, the remains of the World Trade Center, for weeks actively burned in some places, and smoldering in others, became the focus of the nation.

Those of us who watched, maybe too many hours of news coverage came to hate the sounds of bag pipes. In those early days we watched as all work stopped when a mostly intact corpse was found. The firefighters would place the remains in a rescue basket because climbing over all that twisted steel was dangerous. They would line up, helmets in hand and salute as the basket came by. They didn’t know for certain it was a firefighter, it didn’t matter, what mattered was honoring that person.

Ten years have passed. Like seeing Bobby Kennedy swiping at that unruly lock of hair as he told the crowd at the Ambassador Hotel as he told the crowd, “Now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there.”, there are images in our life that stir the grief we have thought was buried. Who, even ten years later, can see those images from 9/11 without an immediate pit in our stomachs, or the salty burning of tears in our eyes? The fireball exploding out of Tower Two as Flight 175 hits the building, the immense cloud of debris rushing down the streets as each tower falls, the smashed fire engines, the people covered in dust, the Pentagon burning, that field in Pennsylvania smoldering, those doctors and nurses waiting for survivors that never came, all images indelibly etched in our memory, in our psyche. We have been forever changed. We will always remember and take time to honor those lost.