I was sitting in the newsroom writing a news article about a recent City Council meeting when I noticed Trish staring at the box TV.
Trish was our office manager and she stood frozen in front of the television, which sat on a file cabinet.
“A plane is stuck in a building in New York,” she said.
Stuck in a building? I thought, standing up and walking over.
I was living and working in an industrial city in western Massachusetts, but I was born and raised in New York. I recognized the skyscraper as one of the Twin Towers that I worked in as a carpenter in my early 20s.
That’s when the next plane slammed into the other tower, exploding into a fireball.
Over the next hour, we watched the towers collapse into gray clouds of smoke and ashes. Later, we’d see people leaping from the shattered windows, black silhouettes speeding towards the hard pavement below.
I thought of the people I met in the World Trade Center when I worked there. The Jamaican security guard who teased me every morning, saying I should be working in an office somewhere with beautiful women, not hanging Sheetrock with a bunch of Irish immigrants.
I thought of the crowds of people that filled the cafeterias. There was the one woman whom I had a terrible crush on and never spoke to.
I remember the white tennis shoes she’d wear with her office skirt.
I thought of them all as the buildings mashed into the city ground, leaving molten caverns of metal and the tangled buildings’ innards on the streets below.
The tragedy was unimaginable and hard to even articulate then and now.
But, we were journalists and it was our jobs to try.
The Massachusetts city we lived in had a lot of transplants from New York and our editor told us to get out there and find them.
It was around 2 p.m. when I walked into Nick O’Neil’s Pub on High Street and was told to speak to an older man drinking a pint.
He was staring at the television news.
He told me his daughter was in one of the towers when the planes struck. He said she called from an elevator saying she was trying to get out. He said the phone then went blank and he tried to call back.
He then watched the tower collapse.
“Has she called?” I asked.
He shook his head no, with one hand clutching his phone and the other drinking his pint.
He couldn’t stay in his house and wait, he said about the beer he kept consuming.
I asked him for his phone number, saying I would call later.
He nodded his head. He was in a daze.
Later that evening, I was typing my article when I looked down at the man’s number.
I didn’t want to call. I didn’t want to hear that he never heard from his daughter. I didn’t want to know that she had become the ash blowing through city streets.
I couldn’t.
I picked up the phone and called.
He answered and I reminded him of who I was.
He had forgotten he spoke with me.
“She made it,” he said. “She made it out. She’s safe.”
I was crying with him as I hung up and finished typing my story.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Aidan Bartos on Unsplash
