9/11: MrsOC: The Morning

Byzantine Chant
Cherubic Hymn - Plagal of 1st Tone
Chanted by Byzantine Master
Professor of Byzantine Music
Mr. George Papanikolaos

The Morning
by MrsOC

I lived in Queens then. I left home early as I always do because I like to get to work before my staff shows up and starts asking difficult questions to which I won't have the answers for several hours. We had just moved the entire staff fifty feet back from the marina side of the gatehouse building to the street side of the same building. We had slightly less room and more windows which meant very little to us except that now instead of looking out over the Hudson we were looking at the World Trade Center.

If the windows had opened, which of course they did not, you could have thrown a rock across the West Side Highway and hit the North Tower and with a bit of effort more you could have hit the American Airlines desk in the front of the South Tower and I often wanted to, but never did. I was at my desk in my office across from the windows but right beside the delivery and processing room. There were 15 guys back there who were all ticket packagers and most of them had been with us since Broadway was a prairie.

Walter was the supervisor in charge. I would have trusted him with my life. Glancing at my computer screen I saw that the phones had cycled on and my agents, some at home, some on the floor were taking calls. Life was normal. At that moment I could not have known it but it was the last time life would be normal for a long long time. It was 8:01 am.

I walked out to the delivery room and said hi to everyone and made my way to the floor to see who was in and who wasn't. I could see the lead agents wandering around the booking floor over the cubicles I saw my Client boss Kevin looking out of his window in his usual not all there way. His father had been a pilot and he had been in the travel industry for 30 years, just like me. We knew all the same people went to all the same parties, got all the same amenities. We had been friends and coworkers for 15 years. It was a normal day.

I went back to my office and checked the service level. At 8:40am we were running at 90% answered in less than 20 seconds. Good that was good. I was about to start working on the service levels for the day before and the briefing for the 10:00am shift when suddenly everything on my desk jumped up into the air and landed back in the same spot it had come from with a jolt. Wham! Being my usual diplomatic self I yelled, “Son of a bitch, not again!”

Having been there for the 1993 bombing I knew that noise very well. Walter and three of his guys came flying out of the back room and into my office-my agents were standing up and looking around their headsets still on saying to people they were talking to most of whom were in the buildings around us “I don't know-can you see anything?”

One of them was off call and she unplugged and walked over to the windows, then another, and another. It hit me that at a terrorist bombing sometime before they had set off a small bomb and when the people went to the windows to see what had happened the big one went off and killed many more. The room was full of people talking to each other I yelled at them to get away from the windows-go to the middle of the office the “ticket prep room NOW” .

Kevin came out of his office and said “It was a commercial aircraft.”

“How the hell did some schmuck fly into the Tower on a clear day?” I asked him.

“Damned if I know.” he said.

The PA system in the building was blaring that we should all remain in the building. In Kevin's office I could see outside there were papers flying everywhere. The Tower was smoking but you couldn't really see the area hit as it was too high up. There were papers and people all over the street moving about. It looked weird. There are never that many people. Something more than the last time had happened.

I crossed the office while my agents complained that I had yelled at them. I remember saying to one of them “If you think that was yelling try screwing around with me now, I'll show you yelling!” Walter took some of my stupider agents into the ticket room and sat them down. He counted to see who was missing.

At 8:45 they should all have been there from 2 shifts. Some were missing. If they were outside we didn't know where and if they were in the Trade Center we sure as hell didn't know where they were now. I called my husband to let him know that I was OK.

He worked almost exactly the same distance from the towers as I did, but on the other side. His office overlooked Trinity Church and Century 21. He said that it was a commercial craft and he didn't think it was an accident.

I said it “had to be, who would do that? It's crazy.”

I was wrong on one count and right on the other.

I called my mother and told her to call my sister the news junkie and tell her we were all right. By then I had the agents back in their seats as they were bored after 10 minutes away from their computers and were wandering back themselves. The Princeton office was calling every 2 minutes telling us to get out because they had televisions and could see what was happening-and we could not.

They knew we were under attack and we thought it was an accident. As I was preparing to shift the calls to Princeton as primary receiver the building jumped again. I walked out of the office and I could see Kevin's head above the cubicles. He didn't say anything and although the PA system was saying to stay in the building. Kevin cocked his head in the direction of the hall leading out and I nodded my head once in reply. We were blowing this taco joint and taking everybody with us.

No mean feat given the assortment of people we had. He wasn't indicating the closest exits but the ones that led to the back of the building were we used to be before they moved us.

I made one last call to Princeton, a call that would make the rounds of the entire company and be laughed about for the whole of the next year-people would tell the story and laugh although it made them feel guilty for laughing. I plugged my headset into an agent desk buzzed the supervisor in Princeton and said “Sherry, if they start to complain that we aren't answering the phones fast enough, tell them we're very very busy.”

It was 9:10am and we were getting out.

I took the lead of the line because Kevin was counting people on the way to the stairs. None of us had ever seen the stairs before or been in the stairwell for that matter but what the heck we weren't getting in the elevators because the numbers were all lit up and they obviously were not operating.

Furthermore the PA was still going on about staying in the building. Yeah, whatever.

The blare of sirens was awful. I am certain that the end of the world will consist of sirens blaring away and paper flying all over the place. The guard at the door to the stairs told me they were only to be used for emergency access and although I can't remember exactly what I said to him I do remember that it contained ever 4, 5, and 7 letter word I have ever known. He got out of the way.

Kevin and I switched at that point and he took the lead I recounted the humans to make sure we hadn't lost anyone-we had every sort of human you can have. A 74 year old Israeli woman dressed to the nines at all times who had been in the army and wanted a gun so she could go up on the roof (in her kid shoes and matching purse) with her perfectly coiffed white hair and Tahari suit to shoot at Arabs.

A three hundred pound diabetic who was as much of a pain in the ass from her dramatics as anything else. One babbling idiot of a secretary who was among us picking up tickets and bitching that she didn't have her sneakers with her, Walter who was all but carrying an otherwise healthy woman down 6 flights of stairs because she was “falling out” all over the place, and our two Indians one of whom was convinced that her next life would be better and the other of whom did not wish to begin her next life just yet.

In all there were 40 agents not including the back room guys and the management people (Kevin and me). When we got to the bottom Kevin tried opening the ground level door but it wasn't moving-Walter and he gave it a shot together and there were flames everywhere.

They closed the door and shouted up to me that we had to go back up.

This might have been alright except that the doors in these stairways are one way. Once you're in you can't get out. Never the less we had no choice so we started back up. Three flights later we were at the cafeteria level and I started banging on the door while everybody else yelled. It sounded like the last scene in The Inferno.

Some kind fool opened the door and we effected our escape through a giant commercial kitchen with gas flames all over the place. Gee thanks. That route took us through the atrium which is the glass structure you have all seen in all the photos with the palm trees. Once out there I looked to the right and realized that the land bridge was gone. Not just damaged-gone.

There was open air where it had been.

We told them to walk down the escalators and for once they didn't argue. Once down the escalators it was a short run to the marina and we felt we were far enough away-because we still didn't understand what was happening.

Kevin was pushing them on to the ferry that goes to Jersey City as fast as he could and others had started walking toward uptown. I had an odd idea that my husband, less than a block away would make it down here or I would make it up there. It was not a particularly sane idea.

I watched all my agents getting on boats and walking away. One of them begged me to go with her to Jersey City-she lived there we could get in touch with my husband-I thanked her and said no he was a block away. I'll find him.

“Go-get on the boat-they're starting to bring wounded you have to go now.” She went.

There were curiously few wounded in fact and I was starting to wonder about that. But in any case I was leaning against the fence at the marina and the man standing next to me was from one of the other buildings. I had seen him around. In downtown Manhattan everybody talks to everybody anyway. Don't believe what they've told you about New York. You can talk to anyone who isn't already talking to the voices in his head and they will answer you.

The smoke was unreal swirling skyward.

We couldn't see the bottom of the buildings but the fire (we thought) was all at the top anyway. I pointed to the transmission tower and said “If that thing comes down are we far enough away?” He shuddered a bit and turned to me “Honey, if that thing comes down, Texas won't be far enough away!”

On the word 'away' the most incredibly loud screeching soul rending sound surrounded us. It was a combination of all the souls in hell and an explosion of a size unimaginably large. The building screamed and began to fall.

My feet decided to go in opposite directions. I began to run and was instantly thrown to the ground. Several sets of feet ran up my legs across my back and somehow skipped my head to be replaced by more feet. Suddenly I felt hands under my arms I was on my feet or rather I was off my feet and being carried along. On my right was a strong tall man and on my left a tiny woman no bigger than I who were carrying me to the edge of the crowd.

When we got to grass over by the Mercantile building they let me down. I looked back and one of the towers was gone. I had no idea what had happened, the people who had carried me were gone too. I was sitting on the grass and I began to take stock of what was broken missing or bleeding. My elbows were both bleeding, my knees were scraped and my shirt was torn. OK that is not bad considering.

My ears were ringing from the sound the building had made but with all the sirens and the general panic around me that wasn't much. Having done my own triage and decided that I wasn't in bad shape I stood up and decided to walk to my son's office on 14th street and 7th avenue. I had lived in New York all my life and worked in World Financial Center for 13 years, in my head 14th Street was 14 blocks away and 7th Avenue was 3 blocks away.

These were not true facts either.

But first I wanted to get to the old Telco Building next to Trinity Church, where my husband worked, certain that he would still be there. It is clear now that I was in shock but humans are very adaptable creatures.

I could hear my father's voice in the back of my head saying “Walk with purpose, put one foot in front of the other and just keep going.” Dad was military, he would know what to do. So I did. The fact that dad had been dead since 1974 didn't have any bearing on the quality of his advice.

The first time the policeman stopped me he looked into my eyes and said, “Mam, you can't go up there.” He was very calm and as I was looking into the third button of his shirt, very tall, I said “oh yes officer, I'm so sorry I lost my sense of direction.” It would have been truer to say I had lost my mind.

He turned me around and I walked away as though I were going to keep going. As soon as I didn't see him anymore I retraced my steps a few feet away and the giant paw once again descended upon my shoulder, “Mam, you can't go that way.”

“Oh yes officer, I'm sorry.”

The third time he caught me he looked into my eyes and said “The next time I see you trying to go toward the Towers I am going to throw you into the Hudson, there are rats in the Hudson.”

Now that I could understand.

I started what would turn out to be a two hour journey to 14th Street. It was a beautiful but hot day. I kept wiping sweat from my face and pushing my hair back. As I walked along the water people I would pass looked at me as though I were carrying my head under my arm. I thought to myself, “Really, people are so rude, they expect you to look your best under these conditions?”

Fighter jets were finally above us, but I couldn't tell who they belonged to.

Maybe we were about to be strafed. I mean, what the hell the rest of the day hadn't gone that well. I turned around several times to see the building, as though it would be back in place and this would all be some awful nightmare that I could awaken from and everything would be as it was before. At one point I looked back and I saw someone in a pink and white striped shirt head down, one leg flexed spinning slowly down from the smoke belching window like a hellish barber pole spinning.


There were two young girls from the high school I guess standing in front of me with their backs to the tower, one had tears streaming down her face like a river the other was saying over and over “my cell phone won't work, I can't reach my mom.”

I decided they were not going to see or remember that site, that barber pole from hell if I could help it. I took one under each arm and said in my best calm grown up voice “none of the cell phones are working. Come with me we are going to one of the ambulances”

I hadn't even noticed them before but there were ambulances on the street-with their back doors open-there was no one to save, that hadn't hit me yet. Either you were dead or you walked away.

I took them to the ambulance and I turned back to the buildings. I arrived below the marina just in time for the second building to come down. This time I knew better. I got on the ground and rolled under a bench.

The second tower seemed faster for some reason. Time had stopped having any meaning. Once that tower was down there was no point in waiting for my husband. He had been in two militaries, the Irish Army and the American Air Force. If every anyone had training in terrorism it was him.

I started for my son's office in earnest. The jets were scrambling over our heads at this point almost non stop. I figured if they were going to strafe us they would have done it by now. A man stopped me and in a half hysterical voice said “They're coming to help us.”

Now just exactly what he thought they were going to help us with was beyond me, but I knew one thing for sure, I wasn't going anywhere near the tunnel to Jersey. If I were blowing up New York after the Trade Center, when everyone is running away full tilt boogie I'm going to mess up the tunnels.

I tried heading up a cross street but it was blocked off. So I zigged to the left and got one more block toward what I perceived to be 7th Avenue. The streets were full of ghost like figures covered in ash which made them look like they were painted with grey paint. I kept walking.

My father's voice reminding me to “Just put one foot in front of the other. Again, one in front of the other.” I wanted water. I am from NY I assumed that they would charge me $5.00 or better for it. The Indian behind the counter backed away from me and said “No no-you take the water. No money-take the water!”

I checked under my arm to see if I was indeed carrying my own head.

The jets screamed overhead every few minutes and each time I dove for cover.

Considering that I was in an area of town at least 200 years old it wasn't a great place to hide. I ducked into a print shop on Reade street the Chinese man said get under the desk. The Desk? What the hell will a desk do?

I kept right on going.


All along the way there were rumors and horrible stories about the Pentagon being bombed, the White House the Congress. I dismissed most of it, but I stopped at cars and vans with their doors open to listen to their radios.

Thus far I had made every possible mistake you can make at a site where terrorism is happening. Eventually I had found 14th Street and curiously I had twice found 7th Avenue although I did not remember there having been two 7th Avenues before. People had still been backing away from me and I was starting to get pissy about it. But I was too tired to answer back.

When I finally located my son's office building I walked in and the security guard went all round eyed and as I said “My son works here” he said “Yes, mam, you go on up.”

Before they had always been a royal pain in the ass ~ I chalked it up to the circumstances. I got off at his floor and one of the salesmen was standing there. He looked at me with that same round eyed horror and said “Where did you come from?” I answered “I think it was hell, where's my son?”

“In his office-he's in his office looking for you.” I walked back there and it was chaos. There were 20 people on phones trying to reach people they knew on downtown streets so they could go over and look for friends. None of the phones were actually working in the downtown area which made matters worse. My son turned around and screamed. There's something about a guy that big (6'3”) screaming that is unnerving. “How did you get here?” “I walked” , “”She walked!!!” He was crying. I was appalled.

Why was he crying? It turned out that he had been in a closed door meeting and someone had burst in and told him that the World Financial Center had taken a 747 and there were no survivors. Which, if a 747 had hit the Financial Center there wouldn't have been. He had been hysterically trying to get a bead on me every since.

His boss was a woman. This was lucky because she took me into the ladies room and I got my first look at what people had been recoiling from. My bleeding elbow had dripped down my arm and each time I pushed my hair back it became more matted with blood mixed with ash. My face which was covered in some gray-black greasy soot was also streaked with blood as was my shirt, my neck appeared to be about to bleed out all on its own.

My knees were scraped and my ripped pants were soaked with blood. My mouth was bleeding and the water I had been drinking had carried some of the blood down the sides of my mouth. In short I looked like Alice Cooper on a bad day.

100 paper towels later I was cleaned up considerably. But I didn't find Timmy for several hours. His brother kept calling him on his cell until he found him, sitting in a park. When the first tower went down he told me, he thought to himself “If she isn't out of there she's dead. And I know she won't leave those agents until they are all out.” He assumed I was dead.

People don't realize how lucky I am.
~ MrsOC

Romanian Orthodox Byzantine Chant
Mărimuri, glas 1 :
Magnifications to Christ and the Holy Cross, Tone 1