PatsBoy12
Pro Bowl Player
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Great post, Mo.
I walked my kids to school along Second Avenue in mid-town Manhattan this morning and reflected that the weather is eerily similar to what it was 11 years ago; crystal clear blue sky and a late summer coolness in the air.
The difference was that when I looked down Second Avenue towards lower Manhattan this morning, the sky was still perfectly blue and not engulfed in black smoke. Second Avenue this morning was not full of fire trucks and other emergency vehicles with their sirens screaming as they made their way to what we now call Ground Zero. I have often reflected on how many of the brave men I saw hanging onto those fire trucks and in those police cars that morning were on their way to their deaths. It still gives me chills.
Later on that morning, Second Avenue was taken over by tens of thousands of people making their way on foot from Wall Street towards upper Manhattan and the Queensboro bridge a few blocks from here.
By the afternoon, as we watched the Air Force Fighter-jets flying cover over the city, the street was a venue for the sickening sight of refrigeration trucks heading for the site; it turned out that they were not needed, given the thoroughness of the destruction.
By late afternoon the air was tainted with the now unforgettable smell of the fire and smoke that slowly made its way north (the wind was blowing away from Manhattan that morning, towards the east and south as I recall), as my wife and I found pillows and blankets in our apartment for co-workers who couldn't get out of a shut-down Manhattan.
As you can see, the day is etched in my memory and we all thank you for calling our attention to it.
RIP.
We will never forget.
I don't even know what to say about this post. It's so deep and poignant. I am a native New Yorker living in Florida now and I have members of my family who work in Manhattan and witnessed the horror that day. My uncle actually worked in one of the buildings that eventually collapsed after the Towers fell, but he happened to be on a week-long vacation at the time.
I had the honor of visiting the site soon after the tragedy and it was eerie. The smell, the site, the attitude of the other visitors and workers . . . it was almost too much for me to take in. I still can't believe something like that happened in this country. We should never forget.