September 11th, 2001 was before I'd been writing this blog, if only by a few years. But with the recent 20th anniversary of the event, and with Josh's writeup of his own experience, I thought it might be fitting for me to write up my own.
In 2001, I was working at Travelers Insurance in Hartford. It was my first programming job, and I'd gotten my foot in the door as a COBOL programmer. That August, over Labor Day weekend, I'd gone to a Lindy Hop camp in New Hampshire at Camp Walt Whitman, and met a girl named Linda. We made tentative plans to get together in New York City a couple weeks later to celebrate my 28th birthday.
The week before, I was taking a CICS class for work. It was a class for work, so I was basically getting paid to attend the class in a building nearby where I worked in Hartford. On the second day of the class, a Tuesday, we heard odd news: a small Cessna plane had flown into one of the Twin Tower buildings in New York City. Weird. I was chatting with Linda on AOL Instant Messenger during the class, which was no doubt verboten, so I did it secretly.
During a class break, we found a bunch of people in the hallway crowded around one of the televisions, which was generally set up to watch a financial channel - many of the classes in the building were for investment-minded employees. But rather than stocks, the TVs all showed the Twin Towers, and that's where we first learned of what had happened.
I chatted with Linda over AIM - she was working in Manhattan, and she was okay for the time being, but she obviously had a much closer experience than I had. She ended up walking out of the city back home to her apartment in Weehawken.
Our date had been scheduled for that Friday - September 14th. I had some friends who told me I was crazy to consider driving into the city given what was going on. But I did.
Our first date was 9/14/2001, exactly 20 years ago today. We went dancing in the city, and I crashed on her couch in Weehawken. The following morning, we took a ferry across the Hudson into Manhattan, and we could still see the massive plume of smoke. I'll never forget that. I'll also never forget the missing persons posters that were pasted up everywhere. It was heartbreaking when you knew exactly what had become of them all.
Tonight, 9/14/2021, Linda and I went out to the restaurant in West Hartford where we got engaged 18 years ago, and we had a nice dinner.