Anniversary

It's coming up to the 5th anniversary of 9/11.

I was going to put a picture here of Chester The Bear. It's a picture shot at the WTC a year or two before the attack when the bear was travelling more than any bear should. I was going to write some words about what an awful act of cowardly bastardry happened on that day.

That's what I had planned.

But when my fingers started reaching for the keys, a different story started to come out, one far more personal. Do I write it? Do I keep it inside? And if I write it, is it really something I want to share with the three or four people who actually come and read my blog? That you're reading it here gives you my answer. Perhaps this is self indulgent, but hey, it's my blog, and I'll cry if I want to.

I'm not American. I don't live in New York. But 9/11 effected me directly and personally, and in ways you, my readers, are unlikely to understand. You see, life as I knew it ended that day, and the chain reaction that was to follow is yet to fully play itself out.

First, a little background. For ten years before 9/11, I had been a business development guy. Now sometimes "business development" is just a euphemism for "salesman" but that wasn't my role. My job was to find business, either to start or to buy, to grow a global company. It was well paid, fast paced, and kept me on aeroplanes and out of Australia for at least two weeks in every month.

It was one of those "dream jobs", where I got to travel anywhere I thought I needed to go, any time I thought I needed to go there, flying biz class all the way, staying in 5 star hotels and burning up an almost limitless expense account. Sounds glam, yes? I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss it just a little, but I will tell you that when your record is 13 trips around the world in 12 months, it really stops being fun.

So that was my job, and I've lost count of the number of times I took a United flight out of Newark, Logan, Dulles or JFK bound for San Francisco or LAX.

I was at home that week. I'd been with a new company for about a year, pretty much doing the same as I had been doing for the old company. My title was "General Manager, Special Projects", which was a completely made up title, but which sort of conveyed what I was supposed to be doing. The special project I was buried in was a biggie, and it meant I was getting to spend way more time at home than normal.

At about 4pm on the afternoon of 9/11 (that's about 5 hours before the terrorists did their stuff… remember that Perth, where I lived at the time, is 12 hours ahead of New York) I was called into my boss's office. The board had, that afternoon, decided to pull the plug on the project. At a risk of US$180m, it was too big for the company to handle, so they were pulling out and that meant waving bye bye to me.

Stupidly (or maybe that should read "arrogantly"), when I signed on, I didn't build one of those golden parachutes into my contract but that was OK. I was bloody good at what I did, had given keynote papers at international conferences, and even testimony to a state legislature in the US as an “expert witness”. I was confident all would be right.

My (now ex) wife (let’s call her Elle, which isn’t her real name but it’ll do, and it’s better than the two other things she gets called around here, PBFH and TEO) was away that day on the other side of the country visiting her parents. That's another advantage of a job like mine... an almost inexhaustible supply of frequent flyer points. We could go anywhere we wanted to go, whenever we wanted to go there, and the previous weekend, she'd decided to head east and take a little time with her mum and dad in a small town in New South Wales called Wagga Wagga.

I spent the next few hours at home, calmly calling business contacts and lining up my next contract. I was talking to some guys in London... actually, the clients for that very big project my previous employer had just killed off. The project was still on... just not with my guys.

"Chester, turn on your TV. A plane's just hit the World trade centre in New York. Got to go old chap" and he hung up.

I thought he was talking about some Cessna 172, and I figured I’d catch it on the late news. I tried to make a few more calls but couldn’t get through, so eventually wandered downstairs and switched the TV on just in time to see the second plane.

Like the rest of the world, I sat in stunned disbelief. I knew people in those towers. Not close friends, but business associates. I had meetings there… plenty of meetings. It was, after all, the office of the Port Authority and my field was maritime. I knew those guys.

The unthinkable was unfolding before the world. No-one believed what they were seeing. I remember when the first tower collapsed… it was quite clear from the pictures that the tower had come down, yet even the reporters couldn’t make sense of what they were seeing. The commentary went something like “oh dear, there appears to have been another explosion”.

By about 3am, I started to realize that my world has just come down too. The work that I did wasn’t going to be much in demand and anyway, I’m not sure I had the stomach for it any more. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was relieved that I didn’t have to get on another aeroplane the next day.

Ok. So the towers came down, there was lots of grief, many tears, shock, disbelief, all of the emotions that any sane human being would have had on that day. So why was Chester any different? After all, I wasn’t in the towers. I wasn’t on the planes, I didn't lose loved ones... but I sat empty, not daring to take my eyes of the TV. For the next day and a half I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat. I just stared at the TV coverage. I couldn’t believe it, and I knew what it meant (or at least I thought I did).

Within 24 hours, the next big hit was heading my way, and there was nothing that could be done to stop it. Remember those frequent flyer points? Remember how they would allow me to travel anywhere I needed to go? They were a security blanket, but the airline they were held with was about to go under. I had managed to drag myself away from the coverage just long enough to get Elle on the last flight that airline ever operated.

Whoosh. Career, WTC and about a million points, all gone in the space of 48 hours.

I just withdrew into my shell. I’d put on the brave face, of course, and I’d make a few calls every day… a sort of half hearted effort to get back into the game, but the game just wasn’t there any more. It would take me ten months to get back into full time work, by which time, it was too late.

You see, readers, what was coming next was a body blow.

Elle had been unwell. Very unwell. She didn’t have cancer, but she still needed chemotherapy and it was only now that she was getting strong enough to pick up her career. She’d actually headed home to see her parents because she was starting a new job the following week, her first in four years. She knew this was the last opportunity she’d have to travel for a while.

What I didn’t know, though, was that she liked it when I traveled a lot. It gave her time for some extra curricular activities. She loved me being around just a little, and hated me being around all the time. She even managed to shuffle me off to a sculpting course one weekend just to get me out of the house. In retrospect, I have a pretty fair idea of what she was doing that weekend. At the time, it was just “a few drinks with the girls”.

I also didn’t know that for the entire time we’d been married, she’d bled me dry. She was spending cash at a rate of $1,000 bucks a week (and that’s on top of the grocery bill and her medical care, all of which were charged to the Amex). This was a thousand bucks in cash, cleverly disguised by shunting money from one account to another before she pulled it, little bit at a time, out of the ATM, and I was too busy to bother with trivial things like bank accounts. That, she insisted, was her job, and she fiercely defended it as the only contribution to the household she could make while she was so ill…

… which of course meant that she didn’t like it much that the money and jet set lifestyle had dried up too.

So she left… she wasn’t happy in that new job and called me one afternoon to tell me she would be late home. She was going to an interview. I wished her luck. She got home at 5am, and moved in with her interviewer the next day. And can you believe she actually charged the dinner with this arsehole to my credit card?

The best bit was, he was a con-man, facing criminal charges in another state for defrauding little old ladies and disabled people of their life savings… something like $4mil in total.

So she decided that life with a criminal con-man was better than life with the guy who held her hand at every chemo session, who shaved his head when her hair started falling out, who proposed to her atop the Empire State Building in New York on very chilly December evening eight years before, and who sold his house to pay for the uninsured part of her medical treatment. No. That guy wasn’t good enough. She wanted Mr Conman. He had more money.

I know some of you will be thinking "big deal... some friggin high paid exec lost his job... get over it." You're right, of course, (though it wasn't as 'high paid' as you might think) and the purpose of writing this was not to elicit sympathy but to simply say "yup... special day".

I also know that some of you will be reading this and thinking Chester’s got an over-active imagination. One of you, though, knows it’s all true, and if it hadn’t been for CAW, I’m not sure I’d have survived to the end of the blizzard. I love you girl. You are the very meaning of the word friendship and that American of yours had better look after you!

And CAW also knows this is just half the story, but I’ll stay on topic and end by saying the crushing devastation was now nearly complete. While I don’t blame the events of 9/11 for all of it, that next twelve months, the second worst twelve months of my life, will be indelibly linked to the tragedy of that day, September 11, 2001.

I will reflect at 8.45 on September 11. I will say a prayer of thanks that I am here telling this tale. I will observe the silence and think much about how the world has changed. And some of that thought will be very personal indeed.