9/11/2001

That day, I was talking to my lovely wife about ordinary stuff at my house, before heading off to work. It was her day off, I think. I pulled out of the driveway, put on WCBS-88 in New York and heard the anchor say that the second tower of the WTC had been hit and was collapsing -- apparently the work of terrorists. I turned around and screeched into my driveway, ran in and angrily told my wife, "The bastards have knocked down the World Trade Center!" I put the TV on, watched more than an hour and then ran off to work, having taken some notes on coverage. I wrote a story in work about the TV coverage that made a special afternoon edition the Register put out. For my son, it was he who noticed the towers on fire while glancing at a TV in the gym locker room. It was his favorite building, one he'd visited on a class trip. For my daughter Cathy, it was her first week of classes in suburban New York and the college's phone system would go down (it had a satellite location a couple of blocks from the WTC in New York City). For my daughter Tina, her 9/11 birthday would be henceforth known as a day of infamy. The next day I called my old friend Mike R., a CFO in lower Manhattan who watched the towers fall and fled north on foot to find a train back to Connecticut. The world changed that day, and we're still trying to assess blame and figure out our nation's reaction in 2006, judging by the debate over the miniseries on ABC Sunday, "The Path to 9/11." I wrote a positive review, but I'm for ABC editing out anything they fictionalized if it puts unverified dialogue in the mouth of a real person. We all know Clinton and minions could have done more; we all know George W. Bush and the neocons wrecked all the sympathy and good will America had in those days by invading Iraq and getting stuck in a quagmire there. I just think the show was well done and, yes, informative.