Although I have lived in or near New York my whole life, I wasnt there on 9/11.
I was sailing between Hvar, Croatia and Taormina, Sicily on the cruise vacation I had been looking forward to for months. My husband and I were in the lounge having tea and trying to decide between the scones with clotted cream or the napoleon when the captain said over the loudspeaker that because of the tragedies in New York and Washington there would be no entertainment that night.
We rushed back to our cabin and turned on the television and even in the middle of the Mediterranean we could see on the screen the horror movie replay of the planes hitting the Towers and the buildings collapse.
Fortunately, I had already established an email account and so was able to email my son in New York. In minutes, he emailed me back. He and my daughter-in-law, both in midtown Manhattan were safe but there were rumors that bombs might go off. He had spoken to my son in Washington. My older son was the chief of staff of a Congressman. He was in the Capitol and had been told to evacuate the building.
Even on television there were rumors of more deadly planes in the air. One might even be headed for Washington. The Pentagon had been hit and another likely target was the White House or the Capitol. My husband and I stayed in our cabin the rest of the day, watching in terror, only slightly reassured when we heard that the fourth plane, which was indeed headed for Washington had been brought down in a field in Pennsylvania.
My son in Washington finally emailed me. He wrote that he had been walking to a Congressional hearing when his boss had been stopped and told about the first plane. At that time people thought the pilot might have had a heart attack and simply gone astray. My son, a New Yorker, said he knew that no pilot could ever have been in the airspace so close to the World Trade Center. At the same time, he had looked out the window and seen smoke billowing out of the Pentagon. He knew we were under attack. He sent his staff home but he and the Congressman out of some sense of battlefield honor stayed in their office. He wrote me, Nothing will ever be the same. And he was right.We could not return to New York and continued on our trip. And at every stop we made in Italy, Greece or Turkey, people expressed their sympathy and their sorrow. We came back a week later to a different city, a wounded city, filled with mourners. Everyone seemed to know someone or know someone who knew someone who had perished on that terrible day. A friend of mines husband was having breakfast in the Windows of the World, the restaurant on the 106th floor of the North Tower.Now nine years have passed, a very long time. Yet for many New Yorkers there is always a sense of potential danger when riding the subway or walking through Grand Central Station, or driving across the George Washington Bridge. The anniversary of 9/11 always reminds me of how much we lost that day: Those mighty buildings, nearly three thousand lives, a sense of invulnerability and our innocence. About the author: Myrna Blyth was the editor-in-chief of Ladies Home Journal for more than twenty years, was the founder of More Magazine and is the author of the New York Times bestseller Spin Sisters. ?
