Caught in New York
September 11, 2001

Page 3 of 5

I asked him his name, he said Ben. I introduced myself and we started walking up 7th Avenue. People were walking everywhere. There was no traffic in the street. No cars, no buses, no taxis, and no subways. Only police cars, fire engines, ambulances, and other official cars. And, it was quiet. Although people were talking, they were speaking in hushed tones, steadily walking North. We walked a little over 25 blocks. It was eerie.

I stopped back by the conference hotel on my way back up to The Manhattan Club, a timeshare where I was staying, and was told that the conference had been canceled. So we went on to The Manhattan Club and sat down to watch television to see what was going on. Thankfully, I had two lines on my phone and we began to try to reach our families again. Telephone service was crazy. We found out that you could eventually get calls through outside of the city, but not inside of the city. I had a cousin in the city who I was also trying to reach. It took about 15 or more tries before we were successful, but finally we both got through, Ben to his cousin, and I to my daughter. What a relief!

But, when I spoke to my daughter, I found that she still had not been able to reach her husband, who worked in New York. So, she was still concerned. She gave me his number at work and his pager, and I told her I would try to reach him on my end. She had spoken to him early that morning because he had called her while he was on the train, but since she heard the news, she hadn't been able to reach him by phone or receive any of his attempts to reach her. She could see that someone had attempted to call her on her cell phone, but for some reason, her phone wasn't ringing, and she couldn't access any messages. This was the same problem Ben told me he had been experiencing on his cell phone.

While I was talking to my daughter, my sister called from Las Vegas trying to find out how my mother and I were doing, since my mother wasn't home when she called her. My daughter told my sister that she was talking to me and would call her right back. She informed me that she hadn't spoken to my mother. We knew she was out taking care of family matters. My grandmother had just passed, and she was out handling related affairs. So we knew it might be a while before we located her. This was not a comfortable feeling at that time.

Ben and I stayed on the phone trying to reach other members of our family with our eyes on the television. I finally got through to my son-in-law's pager and office phone. He wasn't there, but I was able to leave a message on his voice mail. And, then the phone rang. Ben's cousin had reached his father in Florida at work. Ben told me his father started crying when he heard his voice. He was kind of incredulous, but I told him I understood. Any parent would.

Back to the TV. It soon became clear, as we watched people walking over the 59th St. Bridge on TV, and heard about the crash at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania that we might be there for some time. So, I suggested that we go out to the supermarket around the corner and pick up some food and something to drink.

It was a beautiful day outside, the sun was shining, the sky was brilliantly blue, the streets were still quite, no buses running, people just walking, talking about what was going on, but, as you could see by their faces and hear from their comments, they were still incredulous -- still not quite believing what we had seen with our own eyes. In the supermarket, it was the same. Incredulousness. Folks not quite believing that this had happened to us in the United States of America, and particularly right here in New York.

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