September 11, 2001; 1:15 PM

Couldn't sleep last night, tossed and turned, and finally read all of the
back (August) issues of the New York Times.  It was a beautiful morning
crossing the park - everything green and moist after yesterday's storms.

The news was on when I came in to my office at 80th and Broadway around 9:10
- a plane crash into the WTC and then, a few seconds later, a second plane
into the other tower.  Listened to the news unfold, and then I decided I had
to see something of it myself, in person - voyeur to history, or just a
crummy voyeur?  Biked down to the new pier-park near the Trump buildings at
70th and the Hudson.  A giant smoke cloud - twice the height of the surviving
WTC tower - was billowing out towards the East River.  Within a minute, a
ball of flame erupted out of the 80th(?) floor of the north tower, and it
just slid down on itself, like pudding.

Most of us screamed and cried at once -- I buried my face in my hands.  Three
women simultaneously burst into "Hail Mary, full of grace...."   I really
could not (still can not) absorb the horribleness of it -- I thought that,
surely, ten or twenty people I know were being crushed and burned, as I
watched.   But it "seemed like TV" -- now I know I am as insulated from real
life as the worst video freak -- Newton Minow's revenge.

I made my way down the West Side Highway, going against a stream of evacuated
office workers - one guy without a shoe, another spotless, but with a
briefcase absolutely white with dust.  Past the Intrepid -- with two FBI
agents with drawn automatic rifles -- past a huge crowd at the ferry docks at
42nd Street.

Arrived at Canal Street, just as police were establishing it as a perimeter -
on some blocks, it was possible to go a few blocks further south.  The
billowing smoke was three times the height of the Woolworth Building, which
it sometimes wrapped around, like giant, cruel cotton fingers.  Even two
hours after the first explosion, twenty blocks away, you could see tiny
specks, sheets of office paper, like little white cranes, fluttering back and
forth hundreds of feet up, in the brilliant sunlight.

Love and kindess to all, Christopher Gray