I was more than 2,500 miles from New York and Washington and nearly that far from Shanksville, Pa., 20 years ago today.
My first awareness of the attacks came at about 7 a.m. I had gotten ready to leave for word when I turned on my computer to check my email on AOL (yes, the old days). When the home page came up, I saw a small picture of one of the Twin Towers burning.
I immediately crossed the room and switched on the television. I sat there stunned and watched till both towers came down. Then I left for my 45-mile drive to work.
I wasn’t worried for my father. He had spent most of his career in the Pentagon, working as a civilian with the Air Force, but he had retired a decade earlier. I have a first cousin who was still working there, but she was on the other side of the building when the airplane smashed through the outer walls.
I also have a distant cousin who worked in the Twin Towers, but he was fortunate enough to be away that day.
Other than images on television, I never really saw any effects of the attacks until the following February when I flew home to Virginia to visit my parents. In three different airports — Ontario International in California, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Baltimore-Washington International — I saw national guardsmen with automatic weapons patrolling the terminals.
Living in California, one thing I saw over the next five years or so was that 9/11 was a lot less of an emotional thing on our side of the country. I didn’t know even one person who died on 9/11. It was almost as if it had happened on another continent.To people in New York City and Washington, D.C., what happened that day was a game changer.
To many of us it was just another TV show.
That changed in the fall of 2017 when Nicole and I visited New York for the first time in more than 20 years. We spent a rainy afternoon visiting Ground Zero and the museum commemorating what happened that day in New Yosk.
One truly touching sight was the flag put together from small pictures of everyone who died in the Towers that day.
I wish we could have stayed longer and seen more. I had visited the Twin Towers just once, having a snack at Windows on the World in the North Tower in August 1979.
It was memories like that as well as our 2017 visit that made it all real for me.
Nearly all of my many memories of New York came before 2001, from my first visit at age 7 to my sister’s wedding in Central Park in the mid 1990s.
It has always been our most spectacular city, the one that represents us to the world. I hope there is never a time when I can’t look forward to visiting at least one more time.
In that respect, it’s like Paris for me.
Places that make life real.