Chas,
I'll never forget how crystal clear the sky was that morning. At the end of a long hot summer, that was one of the first really nice, clear days we had. The previous weekend, we had celebrated the future arrival of the next generation of my family with a surprise baby shower for my sister-in-law. My sister had flown down from Boston the previous Saturday, and we had a lot of fun that weekend. If I recall correctly, that weekend and that Monday had been really hazy hot and humid. However, that Tuesday was beautiful.
About 8:30, I went out to the shop to work on getting an extruder running. MB called me, but I think I missed her call. Anyway, after a few minutes of phone tag, I got ahold of her. She was watching the Today show, and saw it all happen live. Information was spotty that day, and I wasn't able to get much work done at all. The radio station we were listening to was our only real source of info, since MSN.com was jammed up pretty bad.
In subsequent months and years, I have visited the site in lower Manhattan, but I can't picture the towers anymore. I took some clients to Manhattan for the day in January of 2002, and we went to the WTC site. Many of the home made 'missing' posters were still up then. They had also started to hand out tickets for times to look at the site. I was near the site again in the summer of 2007, but now it is a construction site. I kind of wonder what happened to all those posters. Perhaps they will end up like all the baggage I saw at the Aushwitz II camp in Poland. Just heaped up on top of each other.