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I was driving to my job at Hamilton Bank (RIP) along NW 36th Street in Miami, listening to the Howard Stern show. Gary Dell'abate burst into the studio and announced that "a plane had hit the World Trade Center." My first reaction was that it had to be an accident, ie maybe a bubblegummer crashed his Cessna, and Howard seemed to think it was a joke. Then about five minutes later, they said that it was a United Airlines jet, and I started to get suspicious.

By the time I got to work, all of my colleagues were sitting around the radio. The second plane had just hit and we knew by then that it was no accident. I still found it incredible that they would hit the SAME TARGET twice. I immediately called my father, and told him to turn on the television.

Since I wanted to get a visual on what was once my place of employment (I did an internship at 6 WTC when I was an undergrad), I ran across the street to Citibank, where I knew they had a television. I could not believe that what I was seeing was occurring in real time, and not some bad Jerry Bruckheimer film.

While watching the towers go down, I contacted some friends of mine who worked in lower Manhattan. One (my second cousin) did not show up at Cantor Fitz that day because she had a doctor's appointment that morning. My other friends told me that they immediately vacated their offices (three blocks away) and walked as far north as possible.

Everyone was let out of work that day. I wanted to get my mind off of the tragedy, so I went to my fave book store in Coral Gables, where the streets were eerily empty. I did get into a brief argument with a Lebanese-Peruvian man who told me that while he was saddenned by the deaths, the US had "brought it on themselves." It then told this senile old coot that this was the same argument that Hannah Arendt made in "Eichmann in Jerusalem", and that what he said was equally as disgusting. Before I could slug the old man, his daughter scolded him for having a big mouth, and pulled him into her Lexus (the Chevrolet of South Florida).

I spent the rest of the day in a combination of shock and bitterness. I was angry that I saw mass murder committed in my own country, anger that a major landmark of my childhood and adulthood was gone (confession: the WTC was how I knew I was walking south while intoxicated), and anger that my own country seemed defenseless against a bunch of foreigners who used OUR OWN COMMERCIAL AIRCRAFT against us.

I was passing a TGI Friday's and saw a big crowd outside. I asked someone, "Who's in there?" thinking--since this was midtown Manhattan--it was some kind of celebrity. They were watching the TV, of course.

At work I found out it was airplanes and remembered my daughter was scheduled to fly east on September 11. Drove StarFan crazy with freepmails about whether there were any more planes in the air (she was watching TV) until the phone finally rang. For once, the kid called when she was supposed to. She had been waiting for takeoff and the plane was grounded. Thank you, Norm Mineta. You did something right.