Then

Where were you when. . . .

I had moved to California from New York in mid-August. Perfect timing, in retrospect. New to California, I was on this fitness kick: No more layers of winter clothes to cover winter (and other season) fat. I had even taken up jogging in the mornings. Alarm went off at 6:00, and I was out the door by 6:05, jogging down the hill to this little market where I would buy a bottle of water to rehydrate me on my way back home.

As I walked into the bedroom, around 6:30, my wife (not WOS--ex-WOS, if you will) told me that two planes had just crashed into the World Trade Center. My first thought, "God, that is terrible flying." It took me about thirty seconds to shake off whatever grogginess still remained. "Oh. . . ."

There was a message on the phone from my father; he must've called while my wife was in the shower: "I don't know if you've got the television on, but it looks like we're at war."

I headed out to work. In the car, I swapped classic rock for news. About five minutes into my drive, Bernard Shaw announced, "The South tower of the World Trade Center. . . has collapsed." Reports kept coming in. The Pentagon had been hit. Another hijacked plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. A bomb had gone off at the State Department. That last one turned out not to be true, but the rumors were flying from all directions.

I got to work. One of my colleagues--another transplanted East Coaster--had called in to say she wasn't coming in. She knew some people who worked in the lower Manhattan. I couldn't help but think that, if we had stayed in New York, my wife--who had worked at an employment agency about five blocks from the towers--would have been in the middle of everything.

When I got home that evening, there was a message from my landlord. She wanted to know if we were OK--if people from our old neighborhood were OK. She knew we were from Queens, but she had a Californian's grasp of New York geography. (Since then, I've learned that the New Yorker's grasp of California geometry is just as spotty: Whenever an earthquake hits the Los Angeles area, my parents invariably ask if I'm all right; I live near Berkeley.)

I didn't know anybody in the towers. I do know people who knew people. Two degrees of separation. While the phone lines were jammed for hours, I managed to get an e-mail out to my mother; somehow she managed to get online and reply. "I'm OK. So sad. So much will never be the same."

(Image from Wikipedia)