by Richard Carriero

Created on: December 09, 2006   Last Updated: May 14, 2007

Today is my first September 11th as a New Yorker. I was here last year on September 11th; Adrienn lived in Brooklyn and we came into Manhattan to walk around, but I lived in Jersey still. This year, though, is different. I live with these people, the New Yorkers who wake up and go to sleep in this city. Today I went to pick up a cable modem and wireless router, I went to the eye doctor to get my eyes dilated and checked and I went to the food store to buy ingredients for seafood linguine with vodka sauce. I live here, I work here and I ride the subways, trying never to think about how vulnerable they are.

On that day I was still at Rutgers. I was sleeping in at my Newell apartment when Carrie called. We were still just friends then but we were very close. She told me what happened and I woke up everyone else in the apartment. I turned on the TV and the live coverage showed one tower still standing. We watched for a short while until that tower fell also. I called my mother, she was near hysterical. Rich worked at McGuire air force base at the time and no government installation was letting people go home so he couldn't leave. My mother begged me to come home so I got in the car and drove on the back roads back to Middletown. You could see the smoke rising in the sky no matter where your were. I could see it from 18 and I could later see it from Middletown. Before driving all the way home I stopped the car at the top of Beacon Hill. The view up there is spectacular, you can see everything from Staten Island Long Beach. The smoke column was enormous and rose thousands of feet before the wind current caught it and carried it past Sandy Hook and out to see. The sky was so clear and blue that day. The eeriest thing about today was that the sky was the same perfect deep blue as it was five years ago. I stood up there and watched for I don't know how long. There were hundreds of people who had the same idea and were watching with telescopes, binoculars, and camcorders. The shock on every face was the same. There was the same murmur of hushed conversation everywhere I went that day.

I was the first one home. I went out into the yard. At my house the Sandy Hook bay, directly across from New York harbor, is only a few blocks away. The city is about 8 miles from our back yard. When I went out there I could smell the smoke. It smelled like burning tires. Rich came home first. We drove to the marina together. The ferries were bringing in the walking wounded from New York for outpatient care in local hospitals. There was a tent city set up in the parking lot for an informal triage. There were ambulances and tents for donating blood. The people who came from the boats were all covered in the same white ash. Later I found out that 28 commuters from Middletown were killed that day, another 8 or 9 from Red Bank. Rich and I drove home and were there when my mother got home. The three of us had dinner. We ate with the TV on, and talked for hours about how everything would be different. Eventually I couldn't take it any more and I went to hang out with some friends.

I met up with my friends Bill and Steve and we drove over to our old high school. We rehashed the same conversations about how we would be going to war, about who we knew in the city and how recent our last visits to the world trade center were. It was good to be out and under the clear sky. It was a cool night. The last thing I remember from that day was that there were no airplanes in the sky. My whole life I have lived within 30 miles of the city and I had never seen a sky without airplanes before. I never want to see it again.

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