Ten years ago I was with 20 of my sister women presidents in midtown Manhattan...
...for our monthly peer advisory meeting. We were on a high floor of a midtown office building on the east side and it was a beautiful, crisp day with a cloudless, blue sky. It felt as if fall had arrived. One of our members arrived late, bursting into the conference room to tell us a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. We moved en masse to the adjacent room where we had a direct view of the towers. The blue sky began to disappear as it filled with billowy black smoke. No one said a word except for someone asking if it was an act of terrorism. There were no words. Each one of us did what felt sensible within the chaos of the moment, and I headed home. My husband was in Amsterdam, my daughter had just moved to Los Angeles, my son was upstate in his second year of college, cell phones weren't working, and I had to make sure that our family safe haven was still intact. On Third Avenue as I climbed into a cab my cell phone rang, scaring the wits out of me. My sister from San Francisco wanted to know if I was OK; apparently no one from our family could reach me. I told her about the plane, and she told me the Twin Towers had fallen. I corrected her, explaining what I had witnessed moments before. "Ann" she said, "I just saw it on TV. The towers fell." I was stunned. As I crossed the park in the cab, it sank in that the world was watching.
I was in a daze walking down our block toward Riverside Drive, seeking comfort in strangers’ eyes as they looked for reassurance in mine. Finally home, I collapsed onto the couch, burst into tears and fell asleep. When I awoke to my ringing phone about an hour later, it was my husband, and shortly thereafter my children, all thankful that I was safe.
Yes, I was safe. It was clear, however, that the world was not safe. And it would never be the same again.
