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Mom worked on lower 5th Avenue back then (she has since retired) and she was walking south on either 5th or 6th Avenue when it happened. I happened to have had a doctor's appointment that morning (up in the East 60s -- my doctor and her husband lived downtown and he worked from home, so my doctor was frantic) and only heard about the planes on my Walkman (from that day forward, I am only rarely without it). I got back to my office just in time to see the 2nd tower fall.

My office had the best view in the entire building, so we had a lot of people up there watching, absolutely dumbstruck. One of the guys I worked with had one of those tiny portable TVs and we watched one of the local over-the-air stations give the description of what we were watching.

Luckily, I had had a cable modem installed only about 10 days earlier because phone service in Manhattan was sporadic, at best. My mother and I reached each other, and we agreed that she would meet me at my apartment. She's not in the best of health, but she had to walk from her office on lower 5th Avenue to my apartment on the Upper East Side.

I managed to get some cash from an ATM that didn't have an outrageous line, as well as some groceries, and a friend and I agreed that I'd bring my mother over to her place so all 3 of us could watch Fox News and keep each other company.

I thank God for that cable modem because it was my only link with the outside world. They'd asked us to avoid using cell phones so that the cells would be free for emergency workers, and the landlines were difficult. I had to e-mail my brother in Los Angeles to tell him to call our father on Long Island (only 25 miles from Manhattan) to let him know our mother was with me and doing well.

I knew a few people who died in the Towers. If there hadn't been a hiring freeze at Marsh & McLennan, I'd have been in Tower 1 at the point of impact. To this day, I wonder how I managed to escape that fate. Some friends knew upwards of a dozen. I sent out e-mails to a lot of former co-workers, to see if they were OK. I got an e-mail back from one of those former co-workers who sent me a blackberry message he'd gotten from one of the other men on my list who didn't make it. That message was sent while he was trying to escape.

Another friend is a former cop who spent days at the site, helping with the cleanup. She didn't sleep well for a very long time afterwards.

I have close friends who were among those who were covered in dust and debris. I don't pretend that my story is any more harrowing than theirs. I only know that it angers me no end that so many people here in New York pretend the world is the same as it was on 9/10/01 and that George W. Bush is more dangerous than either Saddam Hussein or Osama. I'd be ashamed for them, but it wouldn't matter because, as we here know, liberals have no shame.