Dammitall

I was visiting my parents at their home about 20 minutes outside Manhattan. Just the day before I'd been walking around downtown in the city with friends and ended up getting my ears pierced.

That morning my mom had left to run some errands and I'd gone downstairs to our family room to switch on the TV. The channel had been left on BBC the night before, and the burning, smoking towers popped up onto the screen. For some reason I switched the channel to NBC; I don't know why. I stood there and watched in disbelief, but at some point I think I went upstairs to make a phone call. I came back downstairs to meet my mom at the back door after she'd turned around to come home. I know we saw both towers go down; I can't remember whether I saw the second plane hit or not in real time. Mom was near hysterical—three of her sisters worked in the financial district, and we later found out that they were among the hundreds (thousands?) who walked home across the Brooklyn Bridge in the aftermath. One of my aunts was almost trampled in the crowd making its way from Ground Zero.

I was supposed to fly back down to Florida the next day or two days after but ended up staying at my parents' house for the next week. Coming back to the city with them afterward was shocking, from the smoke on the horizon and the hole in the skyline to the military vehicles all over the streets. That night I wrote something in my journal about being scared of what the US would do in retaliation. For the rest of my time there I obsessively listened to the local 24hr news station and checked CNN constantly, fearful of hearing what might happen next.

With so many people from my hometown working in finance and the variety of patients in both my parents' medical practices, I remain surprised that I don't know anyone personally who was lost in the towers. There were plenty of kids at my school who had lost parents, but they were too young for me to have known them.

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If one million people replaced a two mile car trip once a week with a bike ride, carbon dioxide emissions would be reduced by 50,000 tons per year. If one out of ten car commuters switched to a bike, carbon dioxide emissions would be reduced by 25.4 million tons per year. [2milechallenge.com]