NOTES FROM A DAY OF INFAMY

It would be a cliché to say that it started out as a day like any other, but I can't come up with any other way to describe the morning of September 11, 2001. I was finishing breakfast and catching the morning headlines - the biggest news being New York's mayoral primary election to be held that day, peppered with the usual updates on Gary Condit, Ellen DeGeneres, and the Mets' improbable pennant chase. As I was packing up to head to the office, the image on TV shifted to the ominous scene of one of the World Trade Center towers, with smoke pouring out of the upper floors. The anchorman, working with obviously spotty information at that point, said that a small aircraft had crashed into the tower, possibly even a news chopper. It looked bad - but not like an attack. New Yorkers, and journalists especially, pride themselves on being unflappable, so I didn't think twice about leaving my Brooklyn apartment to come into the city - SMOKE's offices are a few blocks from the Trade Center - and get a closer look at what was happening.

It was not meant to be. My subway train, which usually gets me to the office within 20 minutes, was stalled between the last stop in Brooklyn and the first stop in lower Manhattan for nearly two hours. There weren't many people on the train, and there was lots of nervous murmuring. I wasn't sure if any of these people knew what had happened, and what little I knew I kept to myself to avoid panic. Finally, the announcement came: Due to an incident in Manhattan, this train is going back to Brooklyn. An "incident?"

The subway took us to the Court Street stop in Brooklyn Heights, and then went out of service. Visibly shaken police officers and transit workers told the confused throng in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of the station - immediately. A train full of people were stranded, with no way to get to work in Manhattan, and in some cases, including mine, no way to get home. And until we all got back up to street level, no one was yet sure why this was happening. As people milled around bus maps trying to find alternate routes, I took out my cell phone and tried to call the office. No service. Two frantic women asked me if my phone worked. I said no, and asked them if they'd heard anything new. One of them blurted out, "The towers... they're just gone. They're not there anymore." This had to be an exaggeration, right?

But then I got my bearings. I realized where I was, and that this area of Brooklyn afforded a stellar view of the Manhattan skyline. I looked over the horizon and saw the unthinkable. Where two proud towers once stood there was now a billowing cloud of acrid, black smoke, a horrendous funeral pyre for what we now know to be at least 5,000 innocent people. It was only then, in that one sickening moment of realization, that I knew this was no accident.

I did manage to retrieve one voice mail from my cell phone: my mother in Pennsylvania, practically in hysterics. She was very aware of where my office is located, and wanted to know if I was alright. Unfortunately, I couldn't call her back. I couldn't call anyone - not my office, not my girlfriend, not anyone that at that moment may have been wondering whether I was alive or dead. Cellular communications were a mess, and were to remain that way for many days to come. Every sidewalk pay phone in the area had a line in front of it at least a dozen people deep.

Still desperately in search of information, I walked into a local watering hole called O'Keefe's Bar and Grill, joining a subdued, shell-shocked crowd of fellow displaced commuters. It was like a morgue with televisions and flowing taps. There I first saw the surreal footage of the second plane hitting the second tower. Then, for the first time, the footage from the Pentagon. And finally, a grim irony: the news that a fourth plane crashed somewhere outside Pittsburgh, in Somerset County - where I grew up. Where much of my family still lives. Where my mother was calling from. And a brief, chilling thought crossed my mind that maybe that hysterical phone call wasn't just about my well-being.

That's when I had my first drink of the day. It was just shy of 12 noon. All things considered, I think I was entitled.

Eventually, I got through to my family on the bar's pay phone. Everyone was all right. I got through to my office and my girlfriend's office, and everyone there was also safe. Subway service further into Brooklyn was back on track about four hours later, and I made it home for what would be a long, numb evening in front of the TV, broken up by welcoming phone calls letting me know that the people in my life had emerged from this dark day unscathed. But looking back to the afternoon in that crowded tavern, commiserating with strangers who had little in common other than a mutual sense of grief, outrage, and a reawakened sense of how precious and fragile these lives of ours are, I knew that not everyone was going to be that fortunate. Too many phone calls made that day and in the days ahead were going to end with the realization that someone wasn't ever coming home again.

I suppose what's really disturbing, even a month later, is how quickly such momentous changes can happen. There was nothing more emblematic of New York's everyday status quo than the World Trade Center towers standing proudly above the rest of the skyline. When I was new to the city, I had an easy system for finding my way around downtown: Trade Center was south, Empire State was north. Now that makeshift compass no longer exists. Thinking about it in such personal, small-scale terms has been the only way for me to deal with the depth of the disaster, the nightmarish magnitude of the carnage that is now a short lunchtime stroll away from my office.

When I got onto the subway the morning of the 11th, the Twin Towers, albeit damaged, were still standing. When I got out of the subway, they were gone. When I woke up on the 12th, nobody was talking about the mayor's race or the Mets. That's how quickly the world can change. And that's the kind of world we all better be prepared to deal with, because it's not changing back anytime soon.