25 years ago I was working at my school’s second campus on 84th street, my third day there in my new role as the site leader. I remember a colleague telling me that a plane had crashed into the WTC, and envisioning a small plane like the one that basically bounced off the Empire State Building in old footage I had seen. As things became more clear, with updates rolling in, I did my best to keep things as calm and normal as possible as students were picked up one by one. When the last kid was picked up at 4 PM or so, I got in my car and WFAN was on the radio. Mike and the Mad Dog did an excellent job of reporting during much of my 4-hour ride back up to Westchester. I had not seen anything on TV up to that point. When I finally got home and my 8-months pregnant wife and two young kids greeted me, I turned into a blubbering mess before I could get through the front door.

We lost a dear extended family member that day. Alex, a huge Knicks fan with two young children, was working up high in the North Tower that terrible morning. Rest in peace, big guy, thinking of you this day as I always do.

Sorry for your loss, Z-man. I was lucky enough to not lose anyone. I had a few friends who worked in the towers, but one was either home sick or just running later that day. Another was in the elevator when the first plane hit. He’s an architect, so he knew that when the building shook the way it did on impact, things were very, very bad, and he told everyone that they should head to the stairs immediately and get out.

At the time, we had an apartment in Hoboken with a view of the WTC. It’s been so long, I don’t remember which tower I saw come down while standing in front of our building, and which I watched on TV. But my god. I still can’t believe it.

I worked on the 102nd floor of tower one from 1980 to ’82, but was working on Long Island twenty five years ago today. Remember watching on a computer in total shock and then being unable to join my wife and daughter, who were in Manhattan, for days as the bridges and tunnels were blocked off. Nothing has come close to matching the feeling of shock, awe, and confusion.

My wife worked on West 59th, and was watching tanks roll down the West Side Highway from her building. Because she lived in Hoboken, she was luckily able to get home that afternoon by taking the ferry. As she tells it, there was a ferry employee who was trying to get people to buy tickets, follow normal procedure, etc., and he was shouted down by the crowd, until another, more sensible employee took charge and just said they were going to fill every boat to capacity, send it out, and keep doing it until everyone had made it back to Jersey.

The scene on 84th street and Columbus was surreal, a perfectly quiet late summer day with the bluest sky ever, occasionally disrupted by a siren or military helicopter flying over. I was doing recess duty with the students running around as they normally do, trying to imagine what the scene was just a few miles south. It became very real to me when a dad appeared to pick up his kid. He had walked up from the WTC area, dressed in a suit and covered in dust.

We normally scheduled an October camping trip to Montauk with our 8th graders but all such trips were cancelled, so instead we took them on the Circle Line. When we rounded the south tip of Manhattan, we could see the ruins, still smoldering a month later.

Minor basketball news, from Shams:

Phoenix Suns center Mark Williams underwent surgery Thursday to repair a torn labrum in his left shoulder and will miss an extended period of time, sources tell ESPN. Williams suffered the injury in an offseason workout.

Creates another team that might need center help, and/or a team that will be reluctant to give away any big man depth.

At the time I lived in the village. I remember the call coming in from my mom and I remember looking down sixth avenue just trying to comprehend the feelings, the horror, the fascination, the fear… I remember watching the two pillars of smoke and they still live painted on me and in me. I remember trying to understand “what does this mean?” Sorry for your loss, Z-man.

Thanks Clarence and Alan. My very best memory of Alex was from the Allan Houston game. We were in separate cars in the parking lot of a restaurant in New Rochelle for a surprise party, bummed to have to listen to the end of that epic game on the radio. I remember Gus Johnson’s emotional call like it was yesterday”…Running jumper….off the front rim…and in!” As my wife and I went wild, I looked across the lot and saw his car rocking up and down like one of those souped-up Chevy’s in Strait Outta Compton, and he later told me he saw our car do same thing!

My grandma who was really more like a parent to me was working in the WTC when it was bombed in 1993. She was 70 years old and worked on a floor somewhere in the 90’s, so she had to walk down 90-something flights of stairs to get out of the building, many of those through thick smoke.

I was at school at Syracuse at the time, and saw her emerge from the building on CNN with soot on her face. Since it was still fairly early in the day, and she was already downtown, she went jewelry shopping and then got on the 1 train and took it all the way to her house in Riverdale. Tough little Italian lady.

She had thankfully retired by the time of 9/11. I was in London on 9/11, had arrived the previous day. It was my first time traveling to Europe, and on 9/10 I spent an amazing night out on the town soaking in the city with these amazingly cool people who owned a graphic design company and who had designed a bunch of iconic album covers. The following day I was at soundcheck at a venue in Picadilly Circus, waiting to take the stage when we got word that the first plane had hit. By the time somebody turned a TV on both towers were on fire.

Our show was cancelled and so were all flights out of London. We were supposed to fly back on the 12th because we were starting a tour a few days later. We were staying in an outrageously upscale hotel and all of a sudden had endless time on our hands, yet it also felt inappropriate to do anything “fun.” So we drank a lot and figured we’d be stuck there for a while. It was very disorienting.

Then we got word that we’d be on one of the very first flights to leave Heathrow, so we gathered all of our stuff including all of the gear we had traveled with and stood in the Longest Security Line Of All Time. We got through all that and made it onto what seemed like a punishingly long and scary flight from Heathrow to Chicago.

But the first show of the tour was in St Louis, and we were running out of time, and when we arrived in Chicago the airport was jammed wall to wall with humanity. There was no way were making it to our connecting flight, which was eventually canceled anyway. So now we have to figure out how to get the luggage and gear, which had been tagged onto St Louis, and we were only able to retrieve maybe a third of it. We got the rest of it days later. So now some of us have no clothes to change into and most of our guitars are in limbo.

But our plucky tour manager figured out we’d have time to possibly rent a van to drive to the show in St Louis. So we get a shuttle to the car rental spot. The line for the shuttle itself was at least an hour long. Then we get to the car rental place. Jammed full of people. Hours of wait, then we are only able to get a minivan, which we now have to cram into with all of our stuff and we barely fit in there for what is at minimum going to be a 4-5 hour drive.

Except it’s a way longer drive, because the minute we pull onto the expressway leaving the airport it’s the mother of all traffic jams. Took hours to get out of Chicago.

We pull up to the venue in St Louis to start this tour. We’re the first on the bill on this tour, opening for Train who had a massive hit at the time and the headliners Matchbox 20. Both of those were bands that all of us detested. Didn’t like them on a personal or musical level. At all.

These were outdoor “shed” amphitheaters and when you’re the first on out of three, it’s daytime and the venues are like 90% empty. So we did this for the next three weeks and it felt like we were just in this horrific limbo. Like who the fuck wants to go watch a Matchbox 20 concert one week after 9/11 and what are we even doing here and can’t we all just go home?

It was like life just crashed and burned. That summer was one of the most joyous, ecstatic summers of all our lives, and it just all went to shit in an instant. We went from being a bunch of young guys playing with a buzzy artist and watching the excitement and momentum building to questioning what we were even doing riding around in a bus playing guitars and wearing jean jackets.

It took a good while for any sense of joy or fun to return in our lives. In some ways we never really did get back to where we were.

Not big on 9/11 reminiscing, but I have one that’s probably a little different.

Flash back to 1998, I’m up in the mountains of Pakistan with my girlfriend doing research. We’re at dinner at a hotel when the waiter comes up and says, “Your friend Akhtar, he is dead now.” (Aktar was my lead researcher and translator and good friend, I’d brought him over to Cornell to take classes the year before, but he had a tendency for depression, and finally threw himself off a cliff). I drove said girlfriend down to Islamabad to fly home the next day, she took a short flight to Karachi on the coast, and flew out at midnight, exactly when the American ships just off the coast began firing rockets into Afghanistan. I imagine it might have been a fine sight if one were looking out the correct side of the plane as it was taking off. (Oddly enough our relationship didn’t last all that much longer.) I went back up into the mountains to get my gear and settle things, rode hanging off the back of a little taxi pickup slowly through what I thought were the mosques letting out but turned out to be a massive anti-American protest (luckily I was fully bearded and wearing a shalwar kamiz and cap, so somewhat blended in). I spent three weeks hiding in that hotel, doing nothing except getting grilled by the secret police about why I had killed Akhtar and going to a houseful of about 19 angry uncles to explain the same, until I could safely leave.

Fast forward to 2001, when I had somehow miraculously restarted things in Pakistan, and had in fact just gotten a grant from National Geographic to take a film crew and a group of professional American rock climbers up into the mountains to make a film about the search for a previously-thought-extinct, four-foot flying squirrel that lives in cliff caves (and whose indurated matrix of feces and urine is collected as an aphrodisiac, but that’s another story). It was tentatively entitled “Xtreme Squirrels,” and it was set for late September.

I did, however, get a bunch of nice Zeiss binoculars out of it.

I was working for Citibank at 111 Wall St on the 11th floor.

The scene I’ll never forget is looking out the widown when the first tower collpased. I didn’t have a view of the tower, but I had a view of all of Wall St. People were running down Wall St and a giant cloud of dust and debris just swalled them all up like a giant tsunami. Then as they exited further down Wall St they were full of all that debris. It was like a scene out of a Godzilla movie.

I was in 2nd grade at elementary school on Long Island when the towers were hit. I just remember someone pulling the teacher out for a moment and whispering in her ear, then the announcement on the school loudspeaker that everyone was to go home. So we all were rounded up and headed back to the buses, unaware of why we were being sent home but happy to have gotten the rest of the day off. I remember the bus pulling onto the LI, and seeing the smoke plume high into the sky to our west.

I get home to see my whole family–other than my father, who had a meeting in the towers that day–huddled around the television watching footage of the towers falling on repeat. I realized what was happening and asked about dad. Mercifully, my father is perpetually late to everything–he was working on a jobsite late at night (he worked concrete) the night before and was late for this meeting. So, he was alright. But I still didn’t see him for several days, as he volunteered with the search and rescue teams in the aftermath and so was in the city for at least three or four days after.

My father was just diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma of the neck last year, which apparently is extremely common in 9/11 first responders. While we can’t verify that that’s what caused it, we have our suspicions. The constitutionally lucky person that he is, he managed to get a leading surgeon at Mt. Sinai to helm his care via his VA benefits. That surgeon had just developed a new technique to excise neck tumors without dismantling the patient’s jaw. He made a full recovery over the next four months and is now cancer free.

While my family and I managed to avoid the worst of it, I can’t help but feel that I will always carry a little bit of that day with me–and, in my father’s case, literally within him.

I was in NY on 9/11 and London on 7/7.

For a while I was legitimately concerned someone was gonna question me.

I was in Kazakhstan on family business when the only other american at my hotel ran in screaming at me “they’re attacking our homeland!” Turned on the TV and saw the CNN feed but with Russian audio that I couldn’t understand. Saw Manhattan, my home, engulfed in smoke. (That’s actually a long and pretty good story, but can’t tell it here.)

But, since Hubert mentions it, I was back in Kazakhstan on family business again for 7/7, with plans to go to London for a week when I was done. I still went, and a few days after the attack the UK observed a 2min moment of silence, where everybody stood out on the street looking patriotically somber. I remember Julian Lennon standing outside my hotel just to the right of me. Maybe Hubert was to my left.

Great stories, guys. For those of you not in the vicinity, it is a spectacularly beautiful day here in the NYC area, very much like it was 25 years ago.

Wishing everyone love and peace as we reflect on this solemn anniversary. And my best to all who celebrate Rosh Hashanah.

My office was on 6th ave between 45th and 46th….one colleague had the SW corner office….could see right down 6th…everyone was in there watching…I was calling a buddy who worked down there and he was describing the scene (until the cell networks started to go out)….it was all surreal..about 3 or 4 ….I took the train back home to Queens and everyone was in shock on the train…just looking at the floor …I was supposed to go on some business trip the next day…I think it took about a week for the airports to open and my jerk boss made me go on the trip…I remember everyone on the flight was nervous…it was a smaller commuter plane from LGA to Cleveland and right before take off someone freaked and wanted to get off….it was a shit show….never forget the return flight a few days later when we flew over the sight on our approach…I didn’t go downtown for quite awhile after that….last summer when we were on vacation…my wife and I went to the memorial and I didn’t realize (other than one guy I knew) that there were a few others that I had crossed paths with through work over the years…very sad.

I was still in bed in my Brooklyn Heights apartment on Monroe Place when the first plane hit. I used to sleep late and roll into my law office on E.54th St at 10 am(elder law/trusts and estates stuff – still doing it). My dad called me with the news and I turned on the TV, completely blown away. My buddy who lived 3 floors above me had just arrived at his office in downtown Brooklyn, heard the news, and started walking back to our building. In the meantime, the first tower fell and the noise generated was definitely audible where I lived. When my friend arrived, the second tower collapsed. Totally insane. We shuffled four blocks over to the Brooklyn Promenade – a place of calm and beauty that we had spent years inhabiting. The dusty, smoky outlines of the towers were all that was left. A Chinese tourist was holding a camcorder next to us. Maybe a few dozen people were there, it wasn’t packed. My gf (now wife) was working in Winthrop Hospital and was unable to reach me. An upstairs neighbor died – his sister arrived later in the day worried because he did not check in. Many of the building’s residents worked near the WTC and returned home covered in dust. They and us stayed outside for a long time – talking.

I was in Kazakhstan on family business

You’re the strangest game of connect the dots I’ve ever played.

well, I never been to kazakhstan, but I been to oklahoma…

Almost the same, geo! Hot and dusty during the summer, cold and windy during the winter. The northeastern two thirds of KZ is as flat as Oklahoma, but right behind Almaty the Tien Shan mountains shoot straight up over the city…

This-a my country of Kazakhstan. It locate between Tajikstan, Kyrgyzstan and assholes Uzbekistan.

Oh fine, Clarence, don’t even mention Turkmenistan. Although I’ve never been able to get in, so maybe okay to leave it off.

Uzbekistan is actually lovely, feels like you’re wandering around in the 12th century. With a bit of Soviet monstrosity thrown in here and there, but less so than in the other CIS countries. Great decorative plateware too, for reasons.

Trying to build a program in the Tajik Pamirs as I type…

Brunson and Ben Stiller at the US open watching the men’s semifinal together.

haven’t much left the house/bed or driven in a couple of weeks, it happens…melted down in the cheesecake factory today…been promising for a while i’d take ma to lunch…

finally decided today would be the day I tried to live and headed over to pick ma up…all the people and noise was just too much though…jaw hurts from grinding my teeth so hard…spent a bunch of it walking around outside…

low on meds and weed in my system right now, try to do better being soberish these days when out on the road…another reason not to leave the house…

more stuff in store before being back home, it’ll happen though…weird sometimes getting stuck in bed, seeking peace, safety…

25 years ago, out of work, stressed, in bed watching tragedy unfold on the screen…

been very blessed throughout life not to be close to any significant tragic events…interesting to hear the stories you all have shared…not something you ever really “get over” i’d imagine…

Don’t have any 9/11 stories.

I was randomly in NY in my parents apt. Someone called and told me to turn on the tv. I was eating a bowl of Grape Nuts, which I had loved as a kid.

I flipped the tv on and watched it all unfold. Walked down about halfway after out of some misguided sense I should do something and then swiftly realized it was well above my pay grade.

Second to last bowl of Grape nuts I have had.

and whose indurated matrix of feces and urine is collected as an aphrodisiac, but that’s another story

Do I have to change my user name again??

Second to last bowl of Grape nuts I have had.

Good Lord, what did it take to get you off GN forever if not that?

JK, I feel for you. I know a novelist who was primed to be a bestseller, on his way to the first stop on a 17-city book tour, and was grounded. Had to rent a car to get home a few days later. No tour. Modest book sales instead of bestseller. Career never took off after that.

My 9/11 stories are too crazy to tell here. Not on the day itself, but what happened earlier, and then some months later.

I did kind of realize later in life that a lot of people think Grape Nuts are really gross. Which, you know, fair.

during his last match checked tiafoe’s height, he just looked a lot, a lot, shorter than his opponent, who was 6’4″…

ben shelton looks like a linebacker out there playing tennis, also 6’4″…tiafoe himself is a good sized human at six foot, two inches…just keeps running in to even bigger tennis players…

grape nuts looked and tasted like pebbles…not fruity pebbles, pebbles pebbles…

I was in 4th grade. They called an assembly and said two planes had crashed but didn’t specify where because enough kids had parents who worked in or near the towers. So I spent most of the day thinking they crashed into each other, which I thought was weird and an odd thing to have an announcement about since planes do crash sometimes. They didn’t shut school down because too kids wouldn’t have had anyone at home.

Eventually my mom picked me up and we walked home. I saw my dad’s shoes lined in dust. He had snuck in and made sure to shower and change so I didn’t see him covered. I turned on the TV around 2 or 3pm and found out what happened for the first time.

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