On September 11, I Was a New Yorker 2,800 Miles From Home
Twenty-five years later, I remember learning about the attacks from Seattle—and realizing how differently they felt when New York was still home.
For me, the story of September 11 starts the night before.
My wife, Pam, and I were living in Seattle. Our friends Dan and Tess were moving there from Philadelphia, and we went to pick them up at the airport. Their flight on the evening of September 10 had been delayed. I remember the weather in New York had been bad because the Yankees game had been canceled.
By the time their flight arrived, and after we got home and had talked for a while, it was around 3am.
I had already planned to take the day off from work because our friends were arriving so late.
So I slept in. On September 11.
At about 6am that morning (Pacific Time), my mom called from New York to tell me what was happening. I didn't hear the phone ring.
Later, the phone rang again just after 7am. This time it was my mother-in-law.
I answered and started talking like it was a completely normal morning.
"Oh, hey, Ma. How are you doing? We're exhausted. We were up really late last night. Dan and Tess came in from–."
She interrupted me.
"Neil, stop. Neil, turn on the television."
I did.
As soon as I saw the screen, I understood. The South Tower had just collapsed.
I woke up Pam, Dan and Tess, and we watched television together for the next couple of hours.
I don't remember everything about that day. I remember being in a daze.
At noon, we went downtown to St. James Cathedral for mass. I don’t remember how we heard about the mass. We just needed somewhere to go.
It was a way to get out of the house and be with other people on this horrific day.
My sister, Amy, had been scheduled to attend a conference that morning that was originally supposed to be at the World Trade Center. The location had been changed before September 11.
My parents were in New York. Friends were there. It seemed like everyone I knew back home either had been close to what happened or knew somebody who had.
I was safe in Seattle.
But New York was home.
At the time, I worked as a public information officer doing media relations for the Washington State House Democratic Caucus. The Legislature was out of session, so things weren't especially busy.
The day after the attacks, everyone at work was still trying to process what had happened. We were watching news reports. People were moving very slowly.
Then, a day or so later, I got a phone call from someone outside my office about some project we had been working on.
The person calling went right into the business at hand—the update, a question, whatever it was. I handled the call, but I remember being taken aback. I was still in shock. I wasn’t ready to get back to business as usual yet. People around me in Seattle were experiencing September 11 very differently than I was.
Of course they were horrified by what had happened. But they didn't necessarily have the same connection to New York that I did. (Thankfully my supervisor and colleagues did not pressure me to get back to work. They understood that I was in a different space mentally and emotionally.)
My sister had nearly been at the World Trade Center. I had friends with direct connections to people who worked there. Pam had a cousin by marriage who was downtown when the towers came down and helped people before eventually making his way home.
For people I knew in New York, September 11 wasn't something that had happened somewhere else. It was personal.
And being across the country made me feel strangely disconnected. People around me started returning to normal more quickly than I was ready to.
There was another part of those first days that stayed with me.
Almost immediately, we began hearing about anger and violence directed at Muslims, immigrants, Arabs and people who were simply perceived to be from the Middle East. South Asians were caught up in that hatred too.
Two days after September 11, a man went to the Idriss Mosque near our home in Northgate and tried to set cars on fire in the parking lot. Pam and I later joined other people from the community outside the mosque for an overnight vigil. We came prepared to stay all night, bringing books, newspapers, blankets and snacks. But I remember it feeling more like a block party than a vigil. That night, we met Issa Qandeel, the man who had confronted the attacker. We talked until morning.
On the first anniversary of the attacks, I wrote about what happened there for Colors NW magazine.
About a week after the attacks, I went to a Hate Free Zone gathering at Seattle Center, organized by now-Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal in response to the growing backlash against Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs and South Asians. For me, that was where I needed to be.But when I think back on September 11 now, 25 years later, I remember those first few days most clearly.
I remember sleeping through my mother's phone call.
I remember my mother-in-law telling me to stop talking and turn on the television.
I remember needing to go somewhere just to be around other people.
And I remember the strange feeling of being a New Yorker living 2,800 miles away from New York at a moment when home had suddenly changed.
I was in Seattle.
But on September 11, I had never felt farther from home.
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