It's About Wine. I Promise.

On September 10, 2001, I moved from Washington DC to an apartment in New York City that sits 1259 feet from what is currently labeled on maps as the “South Pool.”

At the time, of course, it wasn’t a pool. It was a 1362 foot high skyscraper. It was a bit daunting at the time, living, quite literally, in the shadow of such a massive structure.  

But it wasn’t there for long.

The morning after I moved in, at about five minutes to nine, my phone rang. I could see from the caller ID that it was my mother, who, I thought, really should have known better than to call me so early. I had just started graduate school and my first class wasn’t until 11am, so, exhausted from moving, I was doing my best to sleep in. I turned off the phone, and went back to sleep. For 8 minutes.

At 9:03 I was jolted awake when my entire apartment shook, and the unmistakable bass notes of a gigantic explosion rippled through the walls.

 “Fuckers bombed the trade center again,” was my first thought.

My second was: “I have to get out of here.”

I was still naïve enough then to think that buildings in the real world fell like timber, maintaining their structural integrity all the way down as gravity took its course. A worrier by nature, I had done the math before moving in, and calculated that if, indeed, the South Tower were to topple, it would be the 101st story that would hit my bedroom.

I pulled on the first clothes I could find-- a pair of khakis and a white T-shirt—laced up a pair of sneakers (later, I would be grateful that a pair of comfortable shoes had been easiest to find), grabbed my keys, and made my way to the street as fast as I could. The elevator was still working, but I took the stairs just in case.

When I got to the street, I looked up, and could see both towers burning. I was confused, since I had only heard one explosion. I would later find out that I had slept through the first crash entirely, waking only after the second tower had been hit.

My immediate plan was to make my way to the East River, where there were no tall buildings, in case everything started to come down. But I got turned around and walked the wrong way, heading north instead. As the situation seemed to stabilize, the first thing I did was look for a phone to let my parents know I was ok. Cell service was nonexistent, so I stood in line for a pay phone—there were still some pay phones in NYC then—to make a call. I couldn’t get a line to New Jersey, so I called a friend in Washington, DC, and asked her to try to get through to let them know I wasn’t hurt.

At that moment, all of the people milling around lower Manhattan were surrounded not just by the millions of bits of paper that were streaming through the air and the acrid smoke; we were surrounded by the fog of war. Nobody had yet pieced together exactly what had happened.

It wasn’t until nearly 9:45, when I heard on a street vendor’s radio that the Pentagon had been hit, that I was able to put together what had actually happened. Although my first suspicion had been that the scars in the towers had been intentionally carved, I still held out hope that, perhaps, the chaos had been caused by a pilot in a small plane who had a heart attack.

When the situation became clear, anger and determination replaced confusion in the eyes of New Yorkers.The only point of reference most of us had was disaster movies, and it was easy, as we looked at the towers burning, to imagine that we were looking at a gigantic screen, rather than cold reality.

When the sense of helplessness became overwhelming, I walked over toward Beekman hospital, the closest medical facility. I walked into the lobby and found a security guard, and let him know that, although I wasn’t a doctor, if they needed any help—people to move boxes or direct traffic—that I would do whatever I could.

“Stick around,” he said. “We’re gonna need all the help we can get.”

After a few minutes, I became restless, and started to walk toward the towers themselves, to see if there was anything I could do to be useful there.

As I approached the corner of Nassau and Fulton, I heard what sounded like a freight train rumble. Then the screaming started, and the South Tower collapsed. The massive cloud of debris rushed eastward, cresting over the smaller buildings, wooshing down the street.

That’s when I decided to get out of Dodge.

Tens of thousands of people were flooding over the Brooklyn Bridge. But the Brooklyn Bridge seemed too iconic—too likely to be a target. So I skipped it, and walked uptown along the river. When I got to the Manhattan Bridge, it was a roiling sea of humanity. There were so many people on the bridge that it didn’t look safe, so I kept going. I made it to the Williamsburg Bridge and walked across, with thousands of others.

When I got to the other side, I didn’t know what to do. I had only been in Williamsburg one time before that, so I did the same thing I had done previously—I went to Peter Lugar and had a steak. I sat a table with five strangers—I don’t remember any of their names. One had bought a few bottles of wine, and we all ate together and drank together, not knowing when we might get home, or, when we did, who might be there to greet us. I don’t remember what the wine was, or what it tasted like. All I remember is how easy it was to get along with everyone else there. We all had one, big shared problem. Everything else barely existed.

Eventually, when the subway started running again, I made it back to Manhattan. Certain that my apartment had been destroyed, I made my way to a friend’s place in midtown. Her apartment faced south, with a view of both the Empire State Building and the plume of smoke rising from lower Manhattan.

As I walked through the door, my friend thrust a drink into my hand, and said, “Here. You need this.”

I did.

For the rest of the evening, we sat, and talked, and drank champagne—Veuve Clicquot—because We Were Alive.

So tonight, as I did fourteen years ago, I’ll be in New York. And I'll raise a glass of champagne.

I’ll drink because I’m alive.

And I’ll drink to all of the people who lost their lives that day, in gratitude, and in remembrance.

May their memory be for a blessing.