One Who Believed He Could

We are now less than three weeks from the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.  Twenty-one days.  Twenty-one days can be an eye blink.  Twenty-one days can be an eternity. 

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Peter Paul Apollo was twelve days away from celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday.  An equities trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, he was preparing to relocate from Cantor's office in the World Trade Center to its Shrewsbury, New Jersey office.  When he awoke on what proved to be the last day of his all-too-short life, his wedding to his fiance, Debbie Johnson, was only sixty-six days away.  None of those milestones, all of which were so tantalizingly close, were milestones he reached. 

The poem above is one that his family found in an old college scrapbook Peter had kept after graduating from the University of South Carolina.  His parents, who survived him, said he was the man about whom Walter Wintle wrote.  He was the man who never doubted himself, his plan, or all he could attain.  He did not merely think he could win.  He believed he could.  

And that, indeed, made all the difference.