Now I'd Like to Tell You My 9/11 Story

On one of those days when the sky was the kind of blue that made New Yorkers feel we were being rewarded for making it through another summer, the radio report came: a small plane had accidentally crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. There was a small hole in the side of the building.

Nine years later, the story has been told. I just haven't told my story yet, the one about what I did with a friend of mine for the next four years after that.

I would like to tell the story about what went on in our hearts, which were filled with the scenes on the streets of New York -- in the first few days, the families thought that their brothers and fathers and sisters and husbands and wives were lost, not gone -- and they looked for them on the streets and in the hospitals...

...and the story of what went on in our heads -- confusion, first, and then a need to figure out what to do about it all. We thought a lot about the "Missing" posters that families held up to the TV cameras, the ones with the smiling faces on them, caught in their happiest moments, at their sister's wedding, or at their own...

...and we thought about their families, and what we could do for them.

So I will tell you what we did, but more importantly -- much, much more importantly -- how it feels to know that it did help the families, at least a little bit.

The families will know that we will never forget what happened on September 11, 2001. We will never forget their daughters and their sons and their mothers and their brothers and their fathers who died on that day.

Because their smiling faces are on this Flag of Remembrance, and it will hang in the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the site of the World Trade Center for everyone to see...

...and to know that we will never forget.