WHAT MY DAD REMEMBERS ABOUT 9/11

I just wrote about my memories of watching 9/11 from 20 blocks away. Here are my Dad's memories he wrote for McDonogh's "We Remember 9/11" series:

"I was sitting in my classroom at McDonogh. Margaret Bitz, in tears, came and told me a plane had flown into the WTC.

Bo [Dixon, the Headmaster at the time] called all of us to the Horn Theatre, and on the way over we all realized what was happening. As I walked my kids over, I tried to call Jon but could not get through. As I got to the doors of the Horn I broke down, and Bo kindly took me aside and excused me from the meeting for a while. I wandered by the US office where the TV was showing the event.

When we left to go back to Finney, I went back to the US office to watch some more. Petrified, knowing that he [used to work] for the GAP in the World Trade Center, I stood, worried, watching the TV. I knew that he was not there that day, but his apartment was very close to the WTC and my fear was the WTC could fall toward his apartment.

It was not until 12:23 p.m. that I received an email from Jon stating that he couldn't talk right then, but that he was okay. I saved that email for eight years and read that email every day for those eight years until I accidentally erased it."

WATCHING 9/11 FROM 20 BLOCKS AWAY

My memory of the day and the emotions behind it are very separated from the emotion that has been added to my memory since that day, if that makes any sense.

As I mentioned, I had just returned for my sophomore year at NYU when 9/11 happened. I watched the second tower fall that morning from my dorm about 20 blocks away. I missed the first tower falling because I didn’t believe my roommate — who was notorious for joking — when he woke me up and said, “Dude, someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center. Come downstairs.”

When I got downstairs, there were lots of people looking at the building. What strikes me as odd 10 years later is that I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, there’s a terrorist attack, we have to get out of here,” or even, “There must be a lot of people who were just killed in that crash.” I was thinking, “Man, I have to be at work soon. What should I do?”

This detachment from the human tragedy in front of me carried through to later that morning, when my friend and I decided that we should buy disposable cameras so that we could take pictures of it all. This seems so ridiculous to me now — that one of my thoughts that morning was not to help, or even mourn, but to get a camera from a convenient store. It wasn’t until I started seeing streetfulls of people walking past my dorm coming from lower Manhattan with soot covering their clothes, hair and faces that the tragedy really began to sink in.