I remember
I've shared this story before, but something brings it out of me every year, so forgive me for repeating myself... I was in NYC on business three weeks after the towers fell. I still remember how different the city was from the last time I'd been there. Everything seemed so much quieter, everyone so much more polite and subdued. They weren't back to "normal" and no one really seemed to know what "normal" was anymore. I skipped the last day of the convention and took a cab down to lower Manhattan. I felt an overwhelming need to be there, to see it, to feel it. When I told my cab driver where I wanted to go, he told me that he'd worked in the towers. He would have been there that day, but he'd taken the morning off work to take his son to the doctor. I'll never forget the smell in the air as I opened the door of the cab and stepped out. The rubble was still smouldering at that time and that smell filled the air. The merchants in lower Man...