Seven Years and One Day Ago

I kept welling up thinking about it, yesterday. It was a beautiful morning, my favorite kind of morning. Sunny, cool, clear and bone dry. Two working parents with a place in the suburbs, we got going early. I was in the office by about 7:30, a quiet peaceful time when I could get things done.

I always had a browser or two open to the news. Plane crash in New York. That might have been the first thing I saw that morning, I don't know, a lot of the details are gone, too. I tried searching for more for more information but the Internet was jammed with traffic, a preview for my commute to come.

Someone pulled a TV from a conference room and unhooked the VCR. A bunch of us watched the grainy picture captured by the perfunctory antenna. By now, both towers had been struck and watching the live feed, I saw the first one go down. I heard somebody say "better start writing that war exclusion denial." I needed to leave, right then.

I called my wife. "Did you hear the news," she asked. Yes, we needed to leave, now. Trains and roads will be jammed, another plane crashed in Pennsylvania, rumors swirled about the Sears Tower. "But I have Court, I can't leave." I told her there wasn't going to be court today. Ten minutes later she called me back. Court was closed. We were on our way.

In the throng of people on LaSalle we ran into a woman who would someday be god parent to our son, not yet conceived. We knew her a little, her boy was in daycare with my baby girl and the two were buddies. She was heading straight to the center so we all rode together.

Seemed like 1/2 an hour to clear the parking garage. I remember thinking "don't they know this is an emergency, why don't they just open the gate?” I wished somebody would just crash it. Once out, I looked warily up at the Sears Tower. We cleared it. Traffic was crazy. People were blowing stop signs, we were blowing stop signs and narrowly missed at least one accident. I later learned this was not too far out of the ordinary for our driver.

Away from the freeway, the suburbs were bizarre. So quiet, so normal. I found our not yet one year old daughter, picked her up and let the tears come down.

The next few days were noticeably quiet. The constant background of O’Hare jet traffic was gone and the absence was striking. When the planes came back, I couldn’t help watching them for signs of trouble. People were nicer to one another and there was no normal. That gradually changed. The first lawsuit was filed within days.

Months later, someone asked if I had time to work on a new case. Big deal, high profile. Okay. We would not be writing war risk denials. We would be defending one of the security companies who did screening on September 11. Okay. First task, fly to the East Coast. On the return flight, I passed through the same screening checkpoint as some of the hijackers, my clients manning the operations.