In Spokane, I was waking up in the morning at 6:15 A.M. (as I always do)---turning on MSNBC to see the stock market crawl on the bottom of the screen. I was struck by the fact that the crawl was still--which was particularly odd. My first thought was: "is today some holiday that I had forgotten about?" I then looked up on the screen--almost in a delayed reaction--- to see smoke billowing out of the WTC tower. I was in total shock and horror. I had been in that complex (at the observation level) three weeks before (to the day) with my daughter, showing her the NYC I grew up in. I remember hearing the guide tell us that as many as 50,000 people could be in that "little city within a city" around the WTC complex on any given workday. I also knew that my company's home office with many of my old friends and coworkers were in that same area, only a few blocks away. I immediately phoned one of them on their cellphone and somehow got through. Dozens of people were gathered at the building's windows
watching the smoke billow. To their horror, many of them fainted away as they saw the second plane hit the other tower. They will never be the same.
One close friend of mine told me he was pulling into the subway station below the WTC just as the first plane hit. He said there was quite a bit of panic as people practically stampeded out of the station as he hid behind a column to avoid the pressing crowd. As he left the station, he noticed the crowd gathering only a few hundred feet from the burning towers. He screamed at them that they were "too close" to the structure only a few minutes before the first tower came down. Other friends of mine and cousins were struck by debris and are haunted by visions of victims leaping from the tall floors of the tower.
I couldn't go to work that day. My daughter and I cried in each other's arms knowing that many people would suffer the pain of losing loved ones---tragically and needlessly---and once you know that pain you would never want anyone to feel it.