For more than ten years, I lived in East Tennessee while working for a Chicago-based holding company.  Most of my work was in Washington, DC.  I spent time in airports and airplanes just about every week, traveling regularly to major business centers like New York, Philadelphia and Boston.  I averaged 75,000 to 100,000 miles every year with US Airways and another 30,000 to 40,000 miles with United Airlines.  Some years I did an additional 20,000 miles on Northwest Airlines.  I flew about every week.

I know every ticket counter, security checkpoint, bathroom, restaurant and gift shop at most major airports from Pittsburgh to Atlanta, D.C. to Dallas, San Francisco to Chicago and Denver to New York.  I can navigate the D.C. Metro system like the streets of my own hometown.  I have been in the World Trade Center, had bagels and coffee in the lobby from a vendor and met many times with a business partner who had an office on the 27th floor of the North Tower.

Ten years ago, on Monday, September 10, 2001, I worked from home.  I had an airline ticket in my briefcase for a US Airways flight from Knoxville’s McGhee Tyson Airport to Washington, D.C. for the morning of Tuesday, September 11 at 6:15 a.m. – arriving at Reagan National Airport at 7:10 a.m.  At about 6:30 p.m. Monday evening, a co-worker called to tell me I didn’t have to go to Washington, DC the next morning.  The meeting I was scheduled to attend at the U.S. Postal Service Headquarters (just off the National Mall at Le Enfant Plaza) had a change of agenda and I didn’t need to be there. Canceled trips were always my favorite trips.

Tuesday morning September 11 was pretty mellow.  I didn’t really have a schedule because I was supposed to have been in Washington, DC – so I drank coffee and watched the morning news with Wife2Me and the kids.  At about 8:45 a.m., Wife2Me went in to take a shower.  Oldest Son2Me and I were watching the end of Good Morning America when we heard that something was happening at the World Trade Center.  I went in to tell Wife2Me.

We switched the channel to the Today show, which stays on the air longer than Good Morning America.  The Today show wasn’t even reporting it yet.  A few minutes later, they too started talking about what they said was a “small prop plane” that might have hit the World Trade Center.  Within a few minutes, they had video – and it didn’t look like it had been a “prop plane” — the hole in the Trade Center was far too large.  Once again, I ran to the bathroom to tell Wife2Me (still in the shower) what was going on.  Son2Me was trying to figure out how a pilot could make such an outrageous mistake.  Unlike my son, I never really thought it had been a mistake.

Sitting on my couch, with a warm cup of coffee in hand and my son on the floor beside me, I watched at a few minutes after 9 a.m. as the second airplane banked across my television screen and flew directly into the second tower.  Knowing that we were watching live television, not a tape, made this absolutely horrifying.  It hit quickly, but the after effect – the ball of fire and monsterous explosion – seemed to be in slow motion even though it was live television.  Any lingering hint of wishful thinking that this might be an accident flew out the windows on the far side of the South Tower with thousands of office memos, faxes, framed photos from people’s desks and shards of glass.

Later, we watched — live — as both towers fell.

All of these were things familiar to me.  The cities, the airplanes, the people simply trying to earn a living and make it back home to their wife and kids – hopefully before bedtime.  Although I would have been on the ground in Washington, DC that morning well before any of that happened, it could have easily been me.  I had been on hundreds of flights from the same airports the hijackers used and to the same cities they wanted to attack.  I sat with, talked to and joked with people exactly like the ones who were on those airplanes when they flew into those buildings.  Unlike some war in a far-off land, I could relate to every aspect of this.  I could smell the inside of the airplanes, I knew the lobby of the World Trade Center and I could hear the DC Metro conductor say, “Next stop, Pentagon … doors opening on the right.”

Later, we watched footage of the Pentagon taking a direct hit.  Had my trip not been canceled 15 hours earlier, I would have been in a conference room with an entire wall of windows overlooking the Pentagon across the Potomac – I would have been less than one-half mile away.  I would have seen – as many of my friends who were at that meeting that morning – the fire and smoke billowing from the Pentagon.

I don’t know how to end this entry.  There aren’t words that can adequately say how I felt that morning.  I took it personally.  I still take it personally.  There are indeed people out there who wanted to kill us simply for being Americans … and, ten years later, many of them still do.