It’s the sound of the sirens wizzing by that stay in my brain.  We’d just landed the night before from a family trip to London.   I knew a plane  had hit a tower, but at that point I still thought it was a Cessna-type situation.  My husband, also a journalist, ran to work, but I was still in vacation mode so I took our son to Central Park.

But as I pushed my baby boy on the swings, I kept hearing sirens wailing… heading southbound through Central Park and I thought, “could they really be calling uptown fire engines for a downtown fire?”  It was one of many moments of bone-chilling revelation.

It would be weeks before I’d have an opportunity to take my son back out to the park, because I soon reported for work.  We took DV cameras into a firehouse near ground zero where every man on the shift was still missing… and the off-duty guys were starting to filter in with news.  But they didn’t have trucks, a shovel or a radio to help in their desperate search.  The look on their faces stays with me too.

I boarded the first shuttle flight a few days later from New York to Boston after the air space was finally reopened.  It was me, my producer and maybe three other passengers.  I still feel a little short of breath remembering those first few days.

By the time I did get back out to a playground… to a swing…  I felt the world had changed.

I distinctly remember going through the motions of pushing my son who was giggling and carefree, oblivious to the epic drama all around him.  I was thinking of him, but not looking at him — instead, I remember having that  faraway stare and thinking, “you, my son, will grow up in a world very different than the one that existed before Sept. 11, 2001. ”

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