September 11 -- One Decade Later

September 11 -- One Decade Later

9-11-2001

It was my wife's birthday, her first as a resident of Miami -- where we moved from Ohio.

I got up early at our high rise apartment, got the mail that I'd forgotten from the day before and headed to work.

We had big plans that night. I'd take my wife out on the town to celebrate the successful reinvention of ourselves in SOFLA.



At work, in an office filled with former New Yorkers, I proudly showed the cover image that I shot for Total Access Magazine -- a proud photo of the Word Trade Center's Twin Towers accompanying a story I'd written about our beloved Manhattan.

My boss gasped when she saw it -- reports were out that a plane had hit one of the towers. Surely, a tragedy, but only some kind of freak flight accident we guessed...as we scrambled to find someone with a TV in the pre-Twitter, Facebook, blogger days.

As the morning unfolded, it became clear something much worse was happening to America. A second tower hit, the first going up in flames, reports of other crashes by the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.




Stunned, we were ultimately dismissed from our mid-rise worksite. Police cars zoomed past on the highway. Was Miami under attack? Would terrorists blow up the nuclear power plant and forever destroy the Everglades, Florida Keys and diverse Miami?

By mid-afternoon, I was hugging my wife on her 37th birthday -- but not in celebration of her Feliz Cumpleanos or our new life in South Florida.

We were clinging to each other, wondering how we'd evacuate our apartment if an act of terrorism shut down the power -- rendering the elevator useless to help her make it down several floors in a wheelchair.



We watched the TV and hoped for leadership from a president we hadn't voted for. Friends who are Agnostics phoned and said they were praying on bended knees.

Days and nights passed without the roar of airplanes heading to and from Miami International Airport. The posh Mandarin Oriental, usually lit brightly and full of people, looked bare and dim across the sliver of channel separating us on mainland Brickell from its Brickell Key opulence.

Today, a decade later, America is mired in an economic crisis that has hurt more working families than any act of terrorism. New York has survived and thrived. A half decade following the WTC attacks, we mustered the strength to visit Ground Zero.

Heidi, turned 47 on this infamous day, is even more beautiful now than she was a decade ago when life forever turned 9-11 from her birth date to the most memorable and tragic date in American history.