There but for the grace of God

I'm not a terribly religious person. As a half-Jew baptised a Southern Baptist and then introduced to Buddhism, Atheism and Just Not Paying Attention, it's still hard for me to believe in a Higher Power watching over me.

But when I remember 9-11, when I remember how lucky I was when thousands were not, I have to thank the deity that at least part of me still believes in.

For I am a native Californian, not a born-and-bred New Yorker, not even an east coaster. Yet in June of 2001, I packed up my skinny cat and bulging boxes into my Nissan and headed east on I-80. It made my mother cry, but filled me with a kind of glee they don't even sing about on the hit Fox TV show.

I had accepted a job at one of the city's top PR firms, Rubenstein Associates, where I'd be tasked with writing about real estate. What I knew about real estate in Manhattan could be listed on a one-inch notepad: I knew where Grand Central Station was, sort of, and where the Empire State Building was, sort of. I hardly knew what the terms "Midtown," "Upper West Side," and "downtown" meant.

Some were skeptical of why I'd even been hired. The salary was twice what I'd been making as a freelancer, so when my dot com job went belly-up, I jumped at the first chance to move ahead. More money? Check. Glamour? Check.

My dad is from New Jersey, my late grandmother born on Hester Street in Lower Manhattan. I didn't know my New York geography then, as I said. At the time, I figured Jersey was miles and miles away and not a PATH train ride from Penn Station.

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Yet, by August 9, 2001 it was clear that my overzealous attempt to upgrade my lifestyle was drowning in quicksand. I won't get into details, but as a pretty passionate journalist I just wasn't cut out to write real estate PR. I certainly admired everyone I worked with, was thrilled to be working on Sixth Ave. near Rock Center, but it wasn't a fit.

I had been tasked with venturing out into the city to see our properties, which included a building in Chelsea (it was difficult for me to figure my way east from west once I got off the subway), Murray Hill, and in the financial district. Yes, because we represented Larry Silverstein and his World Trade Center buildings, I was on course to visit those, too.

I had taken the elevator up to the top of the South Tower in April of that year, when I was out visiting friends and family and interviewed at Rubenstein. "Make sure to go to the top of the World Trade Center," my former Office.com producer had said. "The Statue of Liberty looks like a green Barbie doll from there."

On that morning, cloudy and grey -- more like one of the San Francisco mornings I'd grown up with -- I breathlessly sauntered up to the guard. No one was there but he and I, over a hundred stories high into the clouds.

I saw his sign: "Zero Visibility--no Access Today"

I grimmaced, and he let me down gently. "Sorry. Maybe next time."

I turned and trudged back to the elevator.

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On Sept. 11, 2001 I was temping in Wilton, CT, at an ad agency where I was tasked with turning on the TVs every morning, ostensibly to watch the firm's commercials play.

Although I wasn't required to be there till 8:30, on Sept. 11 I woke up at 5:20. I could not get back to sleep no matter how hard I tried.

So I jumped in my car and headed out to Wilton, looking for a diner that might be open. For some queer reason, I'd decided to bring my journal and write in it.

As a man blew smoke rings from the booth next to me -- this was back when Connecticut still allowed smoking inside restaurants and bars -- I wrote: "I feel restless today. Is it because I am not ready for snow? Because I don't know how to drive in the snow?"

Like everyone says, that morning was impossibly blue and beautiful and still.

I drove to work early, and got there as soon as I could be let into the building, about 8:00 a.m. I turned on the TVs.

In my entire 40 years, I had never had a job that required me to turn on TVs -- which, given the nature of the work, meant also watching TV.

That is why I saw Matt Lauer break to what was happening at the World Trade Center. That is when my body went numb. That is when my coworkers started milling around, and as news of the horror bubbled up, cries, screams filled the hallways. Someone's husband was in New York at a meeting there, I heard.

I instinctively picked up the phone to call my mom, and then my dad. My dad said, "I'll bet you're glad you're not in New York today."

To be clear, if the world is coming to an end, I will call my immmediate family members first, in no particular order, and didn't call my brother because I assumed he was sleeping and would hear the news soon enough.

I was told to just go home, work was closed for the day. I drove out the driveway, onto the street, out onto the highway. Signs blared that roads to New York were blocked.

That night in Stratford, everyone put a flag outside their door, on their cars, came together as a community. I called a friend and then my dad, both who asked if I was ready to come home.

"No, I feel I should be here."

In the days that became months that became years, I would meet more and more people who knew someone who died that day -- the son of the counselor from Bridges, a mental health clinic where I temped, had perished. His name was Bradley Fetchett. Or the cousin of a patron at Barnes and Noble, where I worked for two years, who was lost at Cantor Fitzgerald on or around the 101st floor.

Later I got a reporting job with Incisive Media in SoHo. They had lost nearly a dozen workers the morning of 9-11, for they were at a breakfast meeting at Windows on The World, on the 107th floor at 1 World Trade Center.

David Rivers had been the editorial director, my friend, the SunGard PR Kelly O'Brien had told me. David had been fun and smart and .... he would have been my boss. "You would have loved David," Kelly said.

I had started at Incisive in the summer of 2004, fewer than three years after David and 2,995 others died.

Tragically, in 2008, Kelly would die of a freak brain aneurysm.

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Eleven years since 9-11 and while it surely doesn't seem like "yesterday", it hardly feels like nearly a fifth my lifetime ago.

For as the Q train purred out of Brooklyn a few months ago, and I was headed back into Midtown, my heart stopped short. For the image of a rebuilt Tower 1 rose garishly skyward, higher than its predecessor and higher than the last victim who lept for his or her life eleven years ago.

Bigger, stronger, better. Are we coming back? Do we need buildings to show us that we are resilient, that we won't take it, damnit?

That is not for me to decide.

Today, and every September 11 going forward, I will think not only of the nearly 3,000 souls who perished but also of my friend, who told me at that bar in SoHo in 2005, that it was just fate that many were not at Windows on the World on 9-11-01.

Including me.