Reflections on 9/11

For a moment we were all Americans

It was my second week as a Ph.D. student. I had gotten over the initial jitters of being a new teaching assistant, meeting my professors, and engaging an entirely new level of work. Overcoming some significant struggles and hurdles, I was settling into a new restaurant job and apartment in Albany, New York with my wife and two-year-old daughter. It would be fair to say that as I was finishing getting dressed on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 1991, I was as absorbed in my own little world as a person could be.

We were renting the second floor of a two-family house about halfway between downtown Albany and the SUNY campus where I was going to school. The apartment was simple; we used the front room (living room) as the master bedroom to allow me to use the smallest bedroom as an office. Our cable had just been turned on a few days before and I had quickly developed a habit of sitting at my desk with a cup of coffee watching the news before I headed out for the day. I was heading there with one arm already in my sports jacket when I heard my wife yell from the office for me to come to see what was happening.