In honor of all the victims of the tragedy of September 11 and its aftermath, their families, and their friends.
I will always remember, as will many of us, where I was the morning of 9/11. A lucky change in job the day before kept me away from Ground Zero at the time of the attack.
I was a vice president at Merrill Lynch (before the recent debacle and sale to Bank of America). For a year, I had been commuting on the PATH train from New Jersey to the World Trade Center, arriving around 8:45 a.m. every day. I then took the escalator and sky bridge over to my office at Two World Financial Center. On Monday, September 10, 2001, I started a new position in the company’s Princeton, New Jersey office. At 8:46 a.m. on Tuesday, when the first plane hit, I was pulling into a parking lot in suburbia, not in a crowd of panicked commuters underneath the WTC. The first sign that something was amiss was when my NPR signal went out. (WNYC had a transmitter on top of the WTC.) The “could have been” occupied my thoughts for weeks.
I don’t want to overstate my experience versus those who were killed, injured, or knew those who were. It affected me, though, in more ways than I realized at the time. It is perhaps not coincidental that shortly after 9/11, Helen and I began to talk seriously about having a child, after more than eight years together. Unseized opportunities took on new immediacy. Yes, it gave us pause, wanting to bring a child into a world where “detonate” is a reflexive verb. But when we lose our faith in the future, the terrorists have already won.
May we all work in whatever way we can for a safer, more peaceful world for our children.
(The tall building with the flat black top just to the left of the WTC in the photo is Two World Financial Center, where I worked.)
Dana
So grateful that you changed jobs. You offer so much to our community through your blog and writing.
Before that day, did you ever imagine that you would be writing a blog for lesbian parents?
Kathy
Thanks, Kathy. Good question, too. When I was at Merrill, I was head of their LGBT employee network, working on some of their online initiatives, and (in my last year there) starting my family, so the pieces were all there. I had no idea of the specifics, however. I started blogging when I left Merrill to stay at home with my son, as a way to keep up my professional skills (online media and marketing) and tap into the community of LGBT parents already online. Life leads us in directions we don’t expect, sometimes–but that’s the fun of it, I think.