11 Years Later

 As we remember all of the people we lost on Sept. 11 2001, I'm struck by the sad realization that our friend David Charlebois -- an American Airlines pilot who was working Flight 77 that morning -- has been dead three years longer than I even knew him. (How is that even possible?) Here's the (iPhone-zoomed) view from my street corner, where my friend Larry and I watched the throng of people covered in soot march to safety. Larry had worked in 7 World Trade Center at one point, and in the confusion of that morning, I freaked out thinking he was down there in the mayhem. He wasn't -- his office was in Midtown -- so he came over to be with me as we waited desperately to hear from my friend Ken, who was also an American pilot out of Washington. (Thankfully, Ken was on vacation in Portland; he was the one to hear about David first.)

By late afternoon, Larry and I -- exhausted from being saddened and horrified -- had gotten hungry so went to Benny Burritos on Greenwich Avenue, a locale that would become off-limits later that night when everything south of 14th Street became a de factor crime scene. Being four blocks north of 14th, however, didn't immunize you from that sickening smell of death that seemed to linger in the air for months. Larry and I walked down to the piers later that night to see what we could see. We weren't alone, and it made me feel safer just to be around other people who had lived through such a traumatic event. In many ways, the memory of that time doesn't even seem real to me anymore, yet sadly it is. That Larry tragically died a couple years later after catching meningitis on a trip overseas only makes the whole ordeal that much more sad and surreal.