I am sorry that I will always think of the beautiful late summer weather as “9/11 weather.” It was such a beautiful day for such a horrible event.
I was driving to work when my H (who worked at that time on Maiden Lane) called me to tell me he was all right. I didn’t know what was going on, so I said, “Well…Ok, I’m glad you’re all right.” He said, “Turn on the radio.” I listened to the reports of the second plane hitting the tower.
My work was closed early that day because people were not able to function. I left early and tried to get my D out of school. The school was not letting children out early, which, in retrospect, was a good thing. My H and one of his colleagues, who was visiting from Brazil, evacuated lower Manhattan on Seastreak. They left breathing through coffee filters. They arrived at Belford covered in dust and debris. The fire companies were hosing people off.
The next morning I got up to let the dog out at about 6 a.m. In my morning fog, I had forgotten what had happened. The moment I opened the back door, I noticed an acrid, burning smell. Then I realized. We are 15 miles from the WTC as the crow flies. The winds blew our way and it stank. I burst into tears.
There were over 30 people in our town who died in the Towers. I did not know most of them but we went to three funerals in Oct.
I was at home, getting the kids ready for work. I had no idea, until my MIL called our home phone number, and all she said when I answered, was the frantic question, "Where’s Mr. Busdriver (of course, she actually said his first name, not that)! When I said, “Oh, he’s upstairs, taking a shower, how are you?” She said, “Turn on the television”, and hung up. She was afraid that one of us was out flying.
I turned on the television. When my husband came downstairs, I told him that I thought this was the start of WWIII. Still not sure about that. My youngest son was annoyed that we didn’t have cartoons on, until I told him, “You see all those little dots coming out of the building? Those are people jumping to their deaths”. Silence.
We didn’t say anything on the drive to school. People drove up to the school, and everybody looked at each other silently. No words. It was kind of ghostly. I had a fleeting thought that this would be a good time to short AA and UAL stocks, but quickly decided I couldn’t bear to profit on disaster. I barely watched any of the aftermath, it was too awful.
I’m the one with the Kindergarten kid in Chinatown on 9/11/01. I don’t remember exactly where I heard this but I remember my daughter and some other kid or kids from her school talking with me about that day, and they said that the cafeteria aides were yelling a lot at the kids. That’s something that is not their style. I was thinking that it must have been pretty terrifying for them to think that the world might be coming to an end right there in school and they were stuck in the cafeteria with a bunch of clueless little kids. Just a thought.