I was born and raised in Queens, NY, and lived there until I got married, so it was personal.
I was home in Raleigh, NC with two of my three kids. The boys were watching "Dragontales" or something like it on PBS. I turned on the radio to listen to a program, when I heard a news report about the President being informed of something and looking grim. I thought, "That can't be good," ran downstairs, and switched the station to news. At that point the towers were in flames.
I got online and emailed a few people, then one of them wrote back, saying how he'd seen the smoke as he drove across one of the bridges on his way to work. He then said, "I can't believe they're gone." WTF??? What did he mean, "gone"?
Ran back downstairs, turned the channel again, and saw the replays of the towers falling. Fell to my knees and wept ... I know so many people who work in lower Manhattan, my brother included. I started making phone calls ...
While I didn't lose anyone close to me, my brother knew a bunch of cops and firefighters who didn't make it. One of my cousin's friends used to work at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of one of the towers. She was gone. My aunt's brother-in-law lost his brother, a firefighter. There were funerals in Brooklyn and Queens for weeks afterward, since that's where most of the police and firefighters lived.
My dad was a retired Port Authority police sergeant. He lost some people in that attack, too. He and Mom were on a cruise when it happened ... Creepy, because they were on a cruise when the towers were bombed in 1993 (?). We began to joke that we weren't going to let them on a ship again!
We also had ties to the Pentagon crash ... When we lived in Virginia, my husband used to work as a civilian for the Dept. of Defense, and the area where the plane hit was the section he used to go to for meetings all the time. He knew one or two of the people who died in that attack.
Cathy Koenig
www.oldlighthousebooks.com
