Up from the ashes

9/11: 10 YEARS ON

Ten years later, and that day remains brilliantly lit yet deep in shadows, its meaning a work in progress - for the nation, for the world, and for each of us

September 11, 2011|By Brian McGrory, Globe Staff

Last in an eight-part series.

They are moments that were never meant to be memories, fleeting bits of life trapped in time.

For Blake Allison, it was the phone call as he drove through the Prudential Center tunnel on the way to his Norwood office. He and his wife, Anna, had lingered at Logan Airport until time pushed them on their separate ways - her on a business trip to Los Angeles, him to make an important presentation at work. She called from the tarmac with a favorite phrase. “Just keep me in your pocket,’’ she said.

Kathy Giuggio glided down the Southeast Expressway toward her office in downtown Boston thinking that U2 got it exactly right. “Beautiful Day’’ was playing on her car stereo. The sun glittered on the skyscrapers and splashed on Dorchester Bay. Her week was to end in Bermuda, at the wedding of two colleagues from the Cantor Fitzgerald investment firm - a beautiful day, indeed.

In the kitchen of their quaint house set back from a country road in Easton, Conn., Lee and Eunice Hanson reminisced about the days when their young son, Peter, accompanied them all around the globe. That morning, in Boston, Peter and his wife, Sue, would take their 2 ½-year-old daughter, Christine, on her first flight, a trip to California, and her proud grandparents waxed about the rhythms and cycles of life.

The list goes on, indefinitely so. Rudy Giuliani, at the tail end of his career in public service, sat at the Peninsula Hotel in midtown Manhattan dispensing advice over breakfast to an aspiring politician mulling a run for governor of California.

Tom Kinton, the aviation director at Massport, checked in with Logan from a conference in Montreal. Everything’s fine, they told him. We’ll see you tomorrow.

Then all semblance of normalcy was gone. It is a story Americans know by heart, but still struggle to define, a story that must be told and told again.

And so: At 8:46 a.m. on a Tuesday morning exactly 10 years ago, American Airlines Flight 11 bound from Boston to Los Angeles, a wide-body 767 carrying 11 crew members and 81 passengers (including Anna Allison) with hijackers at the controls, slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, striking the 93d to the 99th floors of the 110-story building.

At the Peninsula, a member of Giuliani’s security detail whispered to a mayoral aide that a twin-engine plane had hit one of the towers.

Kinton, hearing murmurings ripple through the Montreal exhibit hall, called the Logan command center. “All hell is breaking loose,’’ he was told.

A colleague in Norwood mentioned to Allison that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center, though he was confused whether it was the waterfront exhibit hall in Boston or the office complex in Manhattan.