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collapsed at 10:05 a.m. The North Tower came down at 10:28 a.m. But no one knew the extent of the tragedy. As I walked south, I passed the open portals of several firehouses that would be draped with black in the days to come; past hospitals where the emergency room triage personnel waited at their doors for the injured that would never arrived.

It took me a while to walk the 47 blocks down to my friend Barry's apartment. Barry was up on the roof looking at the smoke clouding the sky to the south. From the top of his apartment, he had an incredible panorama of Lower Manhattan. When I found him, he was standing at the edge of the rail on the roof with both hands gripping the rail. I looked south at a sky filled with smoke and roiling dust. "Where are the Towers?" I asked. He just looked at me and shook his head. One of the other apartment owners brought a TV to the roof and we watched the news reports with one eye and the rising smoke and dust with the other.

As night fell, everyone went on with their lives. Streets became large pedestrian malls with people quietly walking to and from the grocery store or to the nearest bar or restaurant. Quietly, that is, until an emergency vehicle passed; then they would move off the street and line the sidewalks and cheer each and every car, truck or engine that passed. Barry knew a little restaurant down on 12th Street that served an excellent Borscht and black coffee. We sat there eating and wondering what was really happening, and getting up with the others to cheer the emergency vehicles, and then going back to our meal.

It was three days before I could get a train back to Connecticut. That's when I learned that Ethan and three other people I knew had been killed. At one time, Ethan's mother and I worked for the same newspaper. She was the bookkeeper and I was a sports/feature writer. Ethan would stop in every now and again to take his mother out to dinner or shopping. Sometimes during the winters, he would come up from the City and join the broom-ball game out on the pond behind Mr. Schwartz' barn.

That September was a busy time for me. In addition to teaching at NYIT, I was also rehearsing "Dracula" for a Halloween production in the town of Norwalk. Because of the attack on the World Trade Towers, I had missed a couple of rehearsals. But I wasn't the only one. Our director, Harry, was a Norwalk fireman who was specially trained to work with search and rescue dogs. He was one of the first people called in to search for

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