Remembering 9/11/01

Somber day today.

I remember where I was when all of this happened. Back in 2001 I was a full time professional touring musician. Because of my travel and production schedule, I used to sleep in pretty late and, that morning, I had to unexpectedly drive my girlfriend to her job because her car battery was dead. I returned home around 8:30 am and promptly went back to sleep. A short while later the house phone began ringing incessantly. When I finally answered, on the other end was my girlfriend saying an airplane crashed into the WTC. "You should turn on the TV". Didn't think much about it but felt it might be worth at least turning on the news to see how bad the damage was. A few minutes later I watched another airplane fly into the south tower on live TV. Like a lot of Americans, I was transfixed, shocked and horrified by everything I saw that day.

I traveled weekly by air back in those days and things were really eerie. I had a gig in Birmingham, AL that weekend and my flight, incidentally, was about a day or so after the FAA lifted the nationwide ban on commercial and private air travel. In light of the fear around air travel, I still thought it was very strange that there were only 4 people on the entire flight with me that day. My flight was scheduled to depart from Tampa and I had to catch a connecting flight in Atlanta to Birmingham. I made it to Atlanta just fine but then ended up stranded at Hartsfield because the flight crew flat out refused to show up out of fear of further hijackings. In the end, I had to rent a car and make the drive to Birmingham by myself. I made the gig...but just barely. The one thing I remember very clearly was how empty all my flights were in the months after 9/11. I would say passenger traffic was light for nearly a year afterward.

In late December 2001, I was on a 20 city tour for Icebreakers Mints and found myself in NYC for one of my scheduled appearances. One of the things I insisted on doing before I left New York was visiting Ground Zero. I remember that, even after three months, the WTC rubble was still smoldering from fire. That fact stuck with me over the years along with the sight of the memorial "wall" that had been erected a few blocks away (across from Au Bon Pain). Many of the handwritten signs saying things like "Brother Missing, Worked on 104th Floor at Cantor Fitzgerald. Please call XXX-XXX-XXXX if you know his whereabouts" were still there along with quite a few memorial tributes. Really sad.

While I was in college in Connecticut, I spent a lot of time in NYC on the weekends. The sight of the WTC was always a common one to me. Seeing the skyline minus the towers the first few times after 9/11 was something I never got used to.

9/11 is something I won't forget.