9/11 redux

 I do it every year.  I tell myself I won’t, but then … I get sucked into some documentary about 9/11.  

I wasn’t in Manhattan on 9/11, I wasn’t supposed to be in Manhattan that day.  I’d recently landed a job on Long Island, and was driving to my office when the second plane hit.  But I’d spent most of my career in lower Manhattan, or commuting through lower Manhattan to Jersey City, New Jersey.  So I knew a lot of people who were at or near Ground Zero that day.  I knew two people who died in the towers (though I didn’t know them well) and I have two very good friends who came home covered in dust.  

So when I watch a documentary, I see very familiar streets, and I look at the crowds to see if there are people I  know.

And last night’s documentary brought back another memory.

I work in the insurance industry.  Half of the insurance companies in the world do business in NYC, and many of them had offices in or near the Trade Center.   After 9/11 we had to help those companies reconstruct their files.  We were all still working with paper files back then, with some records backed up on computer…There was a spirit of cooperation among competitors that I’d never seen before, or since.

And another memory.  It must have been sometime in October.  I had to be in court for a conference at 60 Centre Street in Manhattan.  The courthouse is downtown, near the Brooklyn Bridge, but far enough away from the Trade Center site that it did not sustain any real damage when the towers fell.

It was just a simple conference with the judge … but it wasn’t.  The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the entity that managed the World Trade Center, was named as a party to law suit.  The lawyer who showed up at the conference … she had no file, her file had been in her office, her office was in one of the towers,   We felt so bad for her … we shared our files with her.  

I try to focus on that, on the way our worst day brought out the best in people.