RAH RAH RAH !

It is difficult to think of that day six years ago. It took a few hours afterwards then to actually fathom much of what had happened during that one hour and forty-five minutes. That's all it took to change everything for everyone in the civilized and Western World.

When I saw The Towers fall, I wondered how many people were in them at that moment. I wondered how many of them I may have known or had casually crossed paths with.

When I saw The Towers fall, I felt a thunderous collective outcry from legions of souls. I could feel the cry of thousands one moment and in the next moment I could feel every voice being extinguished. I felt an immediate hollow develop.

People recall the events of that day and everyone has their personal recollection of it. For me, the events of that day cannot be detached from some of what happened the night before.

The night of September 10th and into the early hours of the 11th, a cold front rolled through the New York metropolitan area. The passing weather system created heavy rain and much spectacular thunder and lightning throughout the night. It was that system that comes once a year and eradicates any sense of the summer away. The kind you wake up to the next morning and unmistakably sense The Fall.

The rain and lightning the night before made for some great sleeping weather. The kind anyone would want to share intimately with someone else. I very much enjoy the rumble of thunder, the flashes of lightning and the sound of heavy rain and being in bed with Wifey. Regrettably, it seems that there just hasn't been a night with weather like that since.

The morning of the 11th was heavenly and dream-like. The beauty of it can not be described in words adequately. Everything had been cleansed by the heavy overnight rain. The air was so crisp, clean and sweet that every breath of it made you feel fortunate to be alive that morning. On that morning, the Sun was shining more brightly and the sky was bluer than they had ever been. It was a remarkable looking start to that day.

Wifey's plan was to drop the four-year-old at pre-school and take the two-year-old to near bye Short Hills Mall to check on some sales. She was to meet another mom at the mall. So, Wifey and The Savages left that morning like any other morning.

I stayed behind about another 20 minutes. Enough to wrangle my coffee and to head downstairs to check on traffic one last time. Manny, the owner of the lawn service who we use, had just done our lawn and a half dozen surrounding others on the street. The smell of freshly cut grass added to the morning's magnificence.

I went outside to start the car, rescue the newspaper and wave a hello to Manny. I came back indoors to see the traffic report on TV at 8:55 but there was no traffic report on WABC, WNBC or on WCBS by that time. The promise that the day had beaconed had suddenly collapsed and perished in a very ugly and extreme manner.

The newscaster on the TV kept saying that a "plane" had just hit the World Trade Center. What kind of plane would create such smoke? Certainly he cannot mean an airliner?

I stood and watched for more minutes and just after 9 a.m., the image on the television showed the shadowy likeness of another plane approaching and then crashing into the other tower.

Jet planes! They were passenger jet planes! Jet planes had just struck both towers!

"Manny!!" I screamed out the sliding-glass door. "Manny, pronto pronto ven aquí! Algo grande esta sucediendo en Nueva York!!"

Manny walked into the family room and we both stood there motionless for a minute or two watching the television. Manny made the sign of the cross and mumbled some prayer or a blessing of some sort. Manny said that his daughter, a lawyer, works in a building a block away from the towers.

Manny then began to appear nervous. He reached for his cell phone and tried and tried to call his daughter but, the lines were already stuffed with impenetrable volume. Soon after the first plane had impacted tower number one, calling into Manhattan had become impossible. Cell or land line, it made no difference.

Manny yelled out the sliding-glass door to his crew and in Spanish instructed them to finish up quickly and fold it all up right away. Some of the crew came up to the sliding-glass door to peer and witness what the television was revealing.

I remember Manny becoming visibly nervous and excusing himself away. I got on the phone and called Wifey and told her not to go to any public places (especially The Short Hills Mall) and to just come home. I told her I was going to race to work.

Wifey was with her good friend ME when I called. ME implored Wifey to call me back and tell me to stop. Wifey did and gave me the widow angle. As she called, I was learning through the voice on the radio that the city had been shut down. All the tunnels and bridges were closed in or out of the city. I was forced to stay. I wasn't able to call work the rest of the day.

News of the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania flights broke.

I drove home and readied the gat. I got the cash limit from the bank machine and then quickly went and filled both cars with gasoline. Wifey's SUV tank holds 42 gallons and can cruise about 700 miles without a fill. We began to plot a back roads drive to Buffalo, New York -- to her aunt and uncle's house -- if anything bigger and more significant were to occur.

For the rest of the day, the phone at the house rang off the hook from people who were on our Holiday card list.

I never saw my colleague, Don DiFranco again. In our town alone, seven dads never came back that day. Manny's daughter turned out to be alright and he very emotionally told me a week later how difficult it was for him and his wife not knowing about their daughter for so many hours.

Sometimes, people who don't live or worked in the NY metro at the time, ask me what it was like and I tell them that I was lucky I was not in the city at the time. I always preface the answer to that question by always stating that the day had started out like a beautiful dream only to radically turn and become a horrible, horrible nightmare all of a sudden.

One that I and the rest of the world have not woken up from yet.
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posted by JerryNJ @ 1:49 PM