25 years

     

I was in the basement feeding the cats before I left for work when the phone rang, and I heard my grandfather’s voice on the answering machine. Afraid that something had happened to my grandmother who was battling breast cancer, I ran up the stairs and grabbed the phone just as it rang again. "They bombed the World Trade Center," said my grandfather, who had seen it on television in Kansas. "Grandpa," I said, perplexed,  "that happened in 1993."   I was a senior in high school then, staring out the south-facing window of Stuyvesant’s brand new building on Chambers Street with a clear view of the Towers. I was one of many students who walked back to Brooklyn over the bridge that day because there was no subway service.'[;;;;;;

      "No," Grandpa said,  "two planes hit the towers." As soon as I hung up the phone and sat down, it rang again and it was my close friend Collin calling from Hawaii where he had just seen it on the news. He was the last person who was able to get through before the service went down. 

    My plan to go to work aborted, I was sitting at my dining room table when I became aware that more and more people were showing up and walking down to the end of the terrace to my neighbors' house. Pretty soon they were spilling out of her small house onto the terrace, cell phones in hand.  The houses are close together and I could hear that they were calling all over the place looking for her son.

My house is the first one after you come up the stairs, so I saw the two men dress uniforms approaching. As they got to the end of the terrace all the phone conversations went silent, and all you could hear were a mother’s screams.  Her 24 year old son had been working at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor.

    Now our corner has an extra street sign. It reads “Terence “Terry” Gazzani 9/11 Memorial Way.”  Every year on 9/11, someone tapes a bouquet of fresh flowers to the pole below the sign.