3 Airports and a Wedding

Where I was on "9/11" isn't especially interesting. I was at work trying to go about my day. As buildings collapsed on TV and another plane hit a little closer to home down at the Pentagon, it became apparent that work really wasn't in the cards for the day so Acorn's management very thoughtfully decided to close our office early in the afternoon. I went home but, despite the endless coverage (Tom Brokaw was my guy), my gut-level sense of the day's impact didn't come until a few weeks later.

In early October, my wife and I drove up to a wedding in Tarrytown, not far outside of Manhattan. The combination of that skyline in person, now defined by the absence of the Twin Towers, and the local TV stations broadcasting live coverage of recovery efforts from the site made it all feel more real than watching Tom Brokaw cover it. The wedding itself was something of a return to normalcy, which ended up being short-lived, because the day after the wedding the invasion of Afghanistan began and we were back to thinking in terms of retaliatory attacks.

Later that week, my boss Glenn and I were due to attend the now-defunct East Coast Video Show in Atlantic City. My wife wasn't crazy about me having to travel but was at least grateful I was taking Amtrak instead of flying. Glenn was flying up from Atlanta and picking me up at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia so we could drive to Atlantic City together. In retrospect, the time spent with Glenn was the best thing about the show, which was kind of a dud (admittedly, that may reflect more about my feelings on Atlantic City than the quality of the meetings themselves).

On the way back, we drove directly to the airport, so Glenn could catch his plane while I took the airport line back to 30th Street and my train home. Walking through the Philadelphia airport for the first time since Bill Clinton was President was an unexpected step into a different world. Walking through the terminal on my way to the train, there were soldiers everywhere. More to the point, there were guns everywhere - big ones in the hands of people I'm not sure were old enough to order an over-priced beer at one of the airport bars.

It would be the better part of two months before getting on a plane would be unavoidable. When that trip came, I was happy to see fewer guns on display at the airports, BWI and Detroit Metro this time around, but that was of limited comfort with more recent worries like anthrax attacks in play. And there’s the lasting impact of "9/11" for me. Whatever today's anxieties might be, there's bound to be something at least superficially worse to take their place, but one fundamental thing will remain. You just have to keep going, because the alternatives are far worse.