I Will never forget the Sept. 11, 2001

Once again, New York rose from the ashes.

It was 21 years ago but I can never forget it. It took a slice out of the Big Apple and a chunk out of my heart.

I remember the morning of Sept. 11 when I was riding the A train from my home in Brooklyn to Manhattan for a breakfast date. I was still sleepy when these two women came through the cars shouting out that we’ve been attacked.

Attacked? Where, when, who, why. I reached my stop in the area of the twin towers, but they weren’t letting anyone off there. It was now 8:30 and I figured I’d be late for my breakfast date.

So I found a cop on duty at the station and he informed me that the twin towers, about 7:15 a.m., was hit by a Delta Airline that came from the north and ripped right through the higher floors of the towering Tower One. He said about 15-20 minutes later. another Delta crashed right into Tower Two.

Then someone else there told me they were listening on their radio, and that both buildings had fallen, crumbled to the ground, people were trapped on the higher floors and firemen were trying to put out the fires and get people out of the buildings, either one.

I called my breakfast date and she gave me all the updated news about the tragedy that she watching on television. We called off the breakfast date. Some people were actually trying to slide down the buildings, find things to hold on, but it was hopeless. Some were jumping out of windows.

She said the scene outside the fallen buildings was a near disaster. People were running from the smoke, the fires, others were fleeing from whatever fell from the buildings, and police and firemen were in an out of what was left of the buildings trying to find and rescue survivors.

I had two long-time friends who were employed by the CIA on the 77th floor, and I don’t think they made it. I heard that one of them was trying to help an elderly woman to a staircase that wasn’t on fire or with smoke up and down it, and his clothes caught on fire, and that was the last I heard.

It was in 1986 that construction of the Twin Tower Trade Center began. It was completed in 1970 and looked out at the Statue of Liberty that stood tall on Liberty  Island in upper New York Bay. The upper highway outside the towers got you through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, but on this day it was now closed because of floods, smoke and dangerous driving.

People up and town Manhattan were checking hospitals, searching for names they knew. It was pure panic, we lost firefighters, policemen, special services volunteers, and thousands who worked in those twin towers, and no one in either airplane that crashed survived.

Now I lived through other nightmares that included two blackouts, in 1965, the massive power failure occurred during the rush hour. I was on the E train heading home when the train came to an abrupt half on the Brooklyn Bridge.

In 1977, the power blew around 8:30 at night, and as I stepped into my apartment elevator, everything went dark and nothing operated. So I walked six flights in total darkness as the entire city shut down. There was also 1993 when a bomb was placed in the lower half of the World Trade Center and six lives were lost.

Yes, New York has really been struck, the transit strike, the taxicab strike, the sanitation workers strike, the newspaper strike, and even the strike by the police department at the same time Muhammed Ali was fighting Ken Norton at Yankee Stadium, and officials cancelled it and moved it to a later date.

Yes, New York City is a real trip and on this Tuesday morning it just added to what the people here have been through. But believe me, they always pull together. They become as one when disaster strikes. Forget the Mets-Yankees subway series when the fans were going at it, that was just a sporting event, now they are one team.