9/11... 2013

Twelve years...

I remember it like it was yesterday.

Indeed, thanks to Glenn Beck, I relived a bit of it this morning while driving to the gym.

Beck broadcast excerpts from the cockpit and air traffic control communications... excerpts from early news reporting... excerpts from witnesses describing the scenes of carnage; desperate, terrified people jumping from the Towers rather than facing death by fire.

Yes... I thank Beck for broadcasting the reality as I remember it - not the sanitized version we'll be getting today via so many sources... the coverage of the mourning with the cause of the mourning largely censored. (Censored, of course, out of the best of motives; after all, the media wouldn't want to unduly "upset people" with graphic replay of events that are "behind us.")

Rob? Phil? Carl? Will you "protect" your children from the reality of 9/11 or will you insist that they witness - as a remembrance, a teaching aid, and a warning - some of the graphic scenes on video which we witnessed live?

I knew people who died in the Towers on 9/11 - luckily, no close friends. But I could well have lost one of my best friends... He Whose Name Dare Not Be Mentioned.

Yep... "He" was supposed to be at a meeting that morning at one of the Towers. I forget if the meeting was cancelled or whether he just couldn't make it for one reason or another, but the point remains that had "He" been there he would have died. How do I know this? Because I know "Him." There's no way in hell he would have joined the evacuation had he survived the initial strike. No... "He" would have stayed there till the very end trying to help rescue people. 

Thank you God for not taking my friend...

I remember it being almost impossible to reach friends and relatives in the City that day. Communications were simply overwhelmed. I did reach all my friends and loved ones eventually, including another of my best buds... Phil. Trying to get out of the City that day was a nightmare and Phil was stuck in that nightmare - with his wife, a new mother - home with their baby in Peekskill. Rather than allow Sally and my godson Ryan to await Phil's safe return alone I drove over there to keep them company. (I just made it over the Bear Mountain Bridge prior to the authorities shutting it down so as to do a bomb inspection.)

Never forget my friends... never forget.