Ten Years Later
By Jeffrey Page
Where were you?
I was at The Record of Hackensack when one of the other reporters noticed smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center, which was visible from the newsroom. Much of what happened after that has remained crystal clear for the first decade. I believe it will remain so.
For weeks after the attacks, the routine was simple, straight to the point. We arrived on time (unheard of, previously), got our assignments, complained less than usual, went out and interviewed people about their losses, their close calls, their shock, their plans for the future, their concerns about sudden widowhood and about children left fatherless or motherless.
Some of the assignments were gut-wrenching, such as my talking with a woman from Clifton who repeated for me her last phone call with her husband who was 90 stories up at the Trade Center. “Can you get out?” she said. “I don’t know,” he said. He told her he loved her. She told him she loved him.
We made our deadlines. We filed our stories early in the evening and went home to get some rest because tomorrow would be just as busy. The adrenaline flow seemed to slow in the quiet of the car and I had a chance to realize how easily I could have been on assignment in the World Trade Center when the planes hit. I thought about death and about my great fear of falling. I thought about my wife, my daughter, which brought me to tears and I couldn’t stop when I thought about the unspeakable numbers of dead, and about all the wives and daughters.
Chances are you know where you were, what you were doing, on Sept. 11, and that you’ll never forget.
Will you tell Zest of Orange where you were on that late summer morning? Heading to work? At your desk already? Working in your yard? Shopping at the supermarket? Having a cavity filled? Planning a late vacation?
How did you hear about the attack? What were your thoughts as the airplanes crashed, one after the other?
Did you lose anyone on Sept. 11?
Did the attack change you? Has it changed the way you relate to the world?
Send us some of your thoughts and recollections – signed or unsigned, your choice – for a 9/11 file here at Zest of Orange.
Post to jeffrey@zestoforange.com
Tags: Jeffrey Page
September 7th, 2011 at 11:53 pm
My future husband and I checked into our rented beach house on Long Beach Island Sept. 10, 2001. The next morning I staggered out into the kitchen/living room area looking for coffee and found Michael glued to the TV. …A fire in the World Trade Center….No, a PLANE hit it…. (Must have been a small aircraft)…No, a JETLINER hit it….
In a particularly surreal moment, we watched as a reporter stood in front of a tower, recounting the event. Suddenly another jet liner appeared over his shoulder, low in the background. I expected to see it pass behind the tower, but it never came out the other side. “Another plane hit the other tower!” I screamed at the benign television receiver. And the reporter, unaware of what had just happened, went on with his newscast.
Then came a report that a plane had hit the Pentagon. Michael turned to me. “We’re under attack!”
I’m sure all the blood drained from my face. I lunged for the telephone and called both my grown children to tell them ….tell them what?….That we weren’t in the trade center or the Pentagon? They already knew that. That they should head for shelter? They were already in an area unlikely to be targeted for attack. My mind groped for some words. I hadn’t expected to get through to them, but I had called so quickly that the phone lines hadn’t yet jammed. I blurted out something comforting, listened to their voices and then, somewhat comforted myself, went back to the TV.
In lower Manhattan, Jeffrey, Michael’s livelong friend and choice for Best Man at our wedding, had gone into a cafe on the ground floor of one of the twin towers for some coffee. Unaware of what was about to happen, he pondered the option of using the Trade Center restroom, but decided to wait and instead boarded the ferry to his job on Ellis Island. From the boat, he watched the second plane hit the second tower.
Jeffrey never made it to work, but he made it home alive. The ferry was ordered back to the dock and the passengers started looking for other transportation. Then the towers began to fall and the dust clouds rolled like giant bowling balls down streets and avenues. Jeffrey ducked into an office a few blocks away and avoided the worst of the contamination. He was one of the many who walked miles to finally find a way home late that night.
Later – much later on Long Beach Island, when the towers had tumbled into ruin and thousands of people had vanished in the deadly dust – we went out, trying to convince ourselves that we could eat something. Long Beach Island was silent. People with ashen faces walked the streets like the living dead. Up in the sky, a fighter jet circled like a hawk. “I dare you,” it seemed to be saying. ” I just DARE you.” We were in a war zone.
In the ensuing years we have never returned to LBI. It had been Michael’s family’s tradition every summer, but in 2001 that tradition ended. We tell people that we can no longer afford to vacation there, but it’s not the real reason. We don’t go back because we have seen how easy it is for tragedy to penetrate even the most enjoyable of places. We have watched the world change, not for the better. And we have learned how powerless we really are to control events in the world and in our lives.
September 8th, 2011 at 9:07 pm
Where was I on 9/11? I will relive that day and the days that followed in my head forever. A New Yorker from birth, I was living in a lovely seaside community on the coast of Maine. Shortly after the first pictures came on television, my cousin from California called me and was surprised that I hadn’t heard. I turned on the TV where I sat for the rest of the day, crying, watching, talking to New York friends and relatives, and of course my children, who both live far away. That’s the first thing we all think of when tragedy strikes – I have to talk with my children.
My son in Dallas called and and we talked for a while, but finally he told me he had to turn off the television and pay attention to his 2 year old daughter who was getting freaked out by what she was seeing. I finally got through to my sister on Manhattan’s east side later in the day, and she was all right, but understandably stricken. We comforted each other for a while. My husband was running errands for our store, and we didn’t get to talk until he got home later in the day. I missed his presence all day long.
But to me one of the most shocking things was that two of the terrorists, including the man named Mohamed Atta, had gone through the Portland, Me. Jetport that morning. We live in Portland in the winter, and when we returned to that house, all I could think was that those two men had gone through our little city to try to destroy America.
The American flag appeared everywhere in Portland; on houses, stores, restaurants, cars, trucks.
I remember having to get away from the television days after, when I could no longer stand seeing those planes hitting the Twin Towers, watching the smoke, the destruction.
I remember sitting on the front stoop of our house in a city whose skies were eerily quiet, trying to absorb what had happened, and what it would mean to us as Americans.
We knew about people who were lost in the destruction – relatives of friends – but the closes was our brother-in-laws brother from New Jersey, who was helping a co-worker down the stairs as they crumbled beneath them.
I will never forget.
September 9th, 2011 at 7:35 pm
Dear Lee and Jean,
Thanks so much for responding to my Zest request for personal Sept. 11 memories.
Lee, I remembver thinking the thought that your husband put into words: We’re under attack. The terror seemed to increase every few minutes as another plane was reported down. I wound up interviewing people at the Vince Lombardi service area on the NJ Turnpike and finding people in a rage and crying all at the same time. I guess I had grown complacent. I never thought such a thing could happen. Which was a dumb guess, seeing as how the trade center was attacked with a truck bomb in 1993.
I would like to use some of your notes in next week’s Zest. Is that all right with you? Please let know at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.
Same question to you, Jean.
That feeling of being too far away from loved ones is very real. My family was closer — Anita in Pine Island and Jessica in Manhattan. No reason why my daughter would have been at the World Trade Center, and she lived at the time way uptown on 103d Street at RSD.
But the sense of fear, helplessness and yes, terror, consumed me until I got my kid on the phone and burst into tears. So much so that she had to comfort me.
Let me know about using your thoughts in another Zest column.
Thanks to you both.
Jeffrey Page
September 14th, 2011 at 9:21 pm
I was at my office, 188W230th St., the Bronx, when every one was dashing to the tv as the flames were bursting from the upper reaches of the WTC. I thought of my wife, home, in first stages of chemo. I told my colleagues I was going home to be w/ my wife. It took me more than an hour to go the block and a half from my office to the Deegan. As I crossed the Deegan I looked down some 20 miles to the smoking towers of the WTC.
The day is etched in my memory. My wife expired three months later, on Christmas Eve, from cancer