September 11, 2018 | About Last Night

Not long after 9/11, I wrote an essay about where I was and what I did that day:

“Get up, son,” my mother said, tapping softly on the door of the bedroom of my childhood home in Missouri. “An airplane hit the World Trade Center.” I came awake a split-second later, my head full of memories. For years, I had wondered when the long arm of terrorism would strike again at New York. I thought of a sunny Saturday morning back when I was living in an apartment house on a hill north of the city. A small earthquake shook the building as I lay sleeping, and the groaning of the old walls woke me. I heard a soft whir through the open window, the rustle of the leaves on the shaken trees. It’s a car bomb, I told myself, unable for one stunned moment to conceive of any other possibility.

All these thoughts flew through my mind in the time it took me to pull on my pants. Then I trotted to the living room, there to behold the coming of the new age….

Read the whole thing here.

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Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 9/11 memorial concert on September 20, 2001. I was there:

“He had realized that many people were emotionally involved with the cause of the nominee, but he had not realized quite the fanaticism that seemed capable of flaring from it at an instant’s notice. He still, after seven years in office, retained some slight, idealistic belief that if you treated people in Washington and the great world of politics and the press fairly, they would accord you the same fairness; he was still shocked occasionally at the extremes of bitterness which often cropped out on what sometimes seemed the slightest of provocations. ‘You know,’ Stanley Danta had once remarked wryly, when his unexpected criticism of some proposal put forward by one of the more popular favorites had suddenly brought an avalanche of personal attack upon his own head, ‘I think I’ll introduce a resolution to change the motto of the Republic from “E pluribus unum” to “It all depends on whose ox is gored.” That would be more fitting, I think.’”