On 9/11/2001 I was working at The Greenfield Recorder in advertising. I had just come back into the office after calling on an account. As I walked into the ad department, Jeannie Martin, the classified manager, told me that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York City. I remember saying that I wasn’t surprised because once the towers were built I always thought that a small plane might accidently hit one of the towers because of their height. Jeannie immediately corrected me, saying that it was a terrorist attack.
I immediately headed for the newsroom where the television was on and watched in disbelief as another plane crashed into the second tower. I remember being stunned and terrified.
I don’t know how long I stood there before heading back to advertising to call my youngest daughter who lived in upstate New York. Her husband, Cesar, was a firefighter in the Bronx. I called for hours and couldn’t reach her. Little did I know, at the time, that my son-in-law had been sent to lower Manhattan that morning. I don’t remember why.
Finally my daughter called me and she was crying because she knew Cesar was in Manhattan and she couldn’t reach him. I immediately took time off from work and headed to my daughter’s house. I stayed with her for a few days as she waited to hear from her husband. We watched replays of the planes hitting the towers and cried.
As it turned out Cesar had rushed to the towers to assist other first responders as they worked to rescue people. He spent days there and eventually he was able to call my daughter to let her know he was alive.
About a month after the attack my son Vincent and I took a bus trip to New York. While we were there we took a local bus down to the area near where the towers once stood.
The bus would only take us so far and then we had to walk the remaining distance. Everything was covered in ash. I’ll never forget the smell. It was overpowering.
As we walked there was a courier’s bike leaning against something. It was covered in ash and had a bouquet of black flowers in the basket and someone had written a name on a piece of paper that was attached to the bike.
There were pictures of missing people hanging everywhere on poles and fences. Finally we made it to the site where the towers had stood. Now it was a mountain of smoking rubble. Of course there were many other people standing in disbelief, some crying, some praying and others apparently in shock. Everything was still smoking and the air was still full of ash.
Nothing could have prepared any of us for the sight. It was almost surreal.
And as noisy as Manhattan always was, there was total silence amongst the crowd standing there. And it was eerie as you could almost feel the presence of all the souls still hovering over the area. We stood for a while and said a prayer for all those who lost their lives on that fateful day.
Sheila Quinlivan lives in Winchester, N.H.