There is actually another pretty amazing and fateful Jethro Tull element to my particular 9/11 experience, if the story is rewound to around 8:30 a.m. that same morning....before anything happened, while Karen and I were getting ready to go to work that day. I can't believe I forgot to include this, although it is actually a separate little prequel.
I'll explain tomorrow....
Jeff
In September of 2001, my wife Karen and I had been married for a little over a year, and we were living in her one-bedroom apartment on Bleecker Street, between Broadway and Mercer, which is a very short block.
Usually, Karen would be ready for work earlier than me, and would leave the apartment before me, between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. We rarely left together.
But on the morning of 9/11, Karen slept late. I was showered and dressed, all ready to go by 8:30. and she was just going into the bathroom to start getting ready. I was feeling good that day, planning to get a lot of work done at the office and also squeeze in a workout, since I didn't have to go to court. I knew it was going to be a productive day, so I decided to listen to some Tull and wait for Karen to get ready so that, for once, we could leave together. And so, as Karen was stepping into the shower at around 8:35, I put on Dot Com. Loud. Very loud. (As is usually the case when I listen to Tull.)
Karen showered, dressed, brushed her teeth, etc. over the next 25-30 minutes, and I continued to listen to Dot Com at a loud volume, turning it down somewhat at Karen's request, but it was still pretty loud. And I continued listening right up until the minute we left our apartment, which was probably right around 9:05 a.m. We left, blissfully unaware of what had just transpired a mile and a half due south from where we lived.
You see, we lived on the west side of lower Manhattan, about a mile east of the Hudson River, and had I not been blasting Dot Com, we not only would have heard the first plane roar by, we also would have heard the first massive explosion at 8:45 a.m., and the second one at 9:03 a.m. (We know this because other people we knew in the building, including the doorman and super, had heard it all.)
But, since I continued to play the music until just before we stepped out, we didn't hear anything, and were shocked to hear from the first person who entered the elevator on a floor below ours that a plane had just struck the World Trade Center, but since the person had mentioned only one plane, we immediately thought "accident"....until the elevator stopped at another floor and someone else got on and informed us that two planes had hit both towers, and then I knew right then and there what it was.
When we got downstairs at around 9:10, we talked briefly to the doorman and super and then went outside to see what was going on. We walked to the corner of Broadway, only about 50-75 feet from our building, and saw endless streams of people migrating north, heading uptown.
As we stood there on the corner, I hugged Karen and started to weep, because we saw the huge clouds of black smoke billowing from the Towers (but not the Towers themselves, which were not visible from that corner.) When I first moved to NYC, I worked for Aetna's house counsel on the 37th floor of 2 World Trade Center, from 1987 to 1989, and I used to look out those windows in amazement, because it was just so damn exciting to work in those towers, which had so fascinated me when I was a kid; as I stood there on that corner on 9/11, I had a vision of myself standing in my office and a plane flying right into the building where I was standing, so I immediately understood the loss of life that had already occurred and that our country and
my city had just been attacked by terrorists.
Karen, though, and many others I am sure, did not immediately realize the magnitude of what had just happened. And because she was, and still is, extremely dedicated to her job, she wanted to go downtown to her office in the Federal Building, which is only six blocks north of the World Trade Center, and had I not been there with her that morning, she probably would have done so, and put herself in great peril. But I said to her "what, are you crazy or something, you're not going down there", and so she did not.
It was then that we walked to the corner of Mercer and Bleecker, looked south and saw the two sad, beautiful Towers going up in flames and smoke, with those terrible gaping holes. By now it was probably 9:15, 9:20, and people were out there with their cameras taking pictures, which upset me a great deal, and knowing that the Towers would soon topple or fall, I said, "Let's go upstairs, Karen...I can't watch this." And so we did. A decision I am grateful for to this day, because had we stayed and looked on for another thirty minutes or so, as we easily could have done, we would have seen Tower 2 disintentegrate before our eyes.
So, it was all because of my fateful decision to listen to Tull that morning and wait for my wife, that Karen and I were spared the agony of hearing the roaring engines of the first plane as it stormed by, and the two tremendous explosions that followed, and had I not listened to Dot Com that morning, had I left for my office instead, Karen probably would have ventured downtown and been a short distance away when Tower 2 collapsed at 10:00 a.m, and who knows what might have happened to her, and what our lives/my life would have been like then?
Jeff
