February 26, 1993 was a cold, dreary, typical February day. It was a Friday. I was in my second year at Seton Hall Law in Newark. Margaret and I were engaged to be married that June. In four short months, I would become her husband and Suzanne and Rob's parent. The times indeed were a-changing for Yours truly.
I worked while attending law school full-time. The second semester of law school's second year I had a single class on Friday, in which class was also one of my closest law school friends, Kelly Symons. Our Friday "tradition" (giving that word its broadest definitional interpretation) was to walk to Newark Penn Station, grab a slice of Sbarro's Pizza, and shoot the breeze for 10 or 15 minutes before she hopped the PATH train to the World Trade Center and home in Manhattan and I hopped the New Jersey Northeast Corridor Line train to the Edison, New Jersey station and work.
Thirty years later, I have no memory of the class we attended on Friday mornings or the time at which it began or ended. I remember simply that I had to be in Edison for work by 1 pm and, working backwards, I typically took the train that got me into Edison (I worked across the street from the train station) by 12:45. Working backwards, it seems to me that on most Fridays that semester I boarded a train bound for Edison that left Newark at or about noon. But not that Friday.
Thirty years later, I have an explicit, vivid memory of taking an earlier train on that cold final February Friday. For whatever reason, when we reached Penn Station that day, Kelly opted out of pizza so instead of hanging out for our usual 10-15 minutes, said "See you on Monday" to each other and walked off to our respective trains.
Kelly's decision may have saved her life. Her route home took her on the PATH train to the World Trade Center Station, located under the Twin Towers. Had we followed our usual Friday pattern, she would have ended up on a PATH train out of Newark fifteen to twenty minutes later than the one she boarded. At 12:18 PM, terrorists detonated a bomb they had placed inside of a U-Haul truck that they had driven into - and parked - in the garage beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Six people were killed: John DiGiovanni (45); Robert Kirkpatrick (61); Steven Knapp (47); Bill Macko (57); Wilfredo Mercado (37); and Monica Rodriguez Smith (35), who was seven months pregnant. More than 1,000 other people sustained injuries of varying degrees.
1993 was the "pre cell phone/pre-instant information" era. I had no idea what had transpired in Lower Manhattan until I walked into my place of work that afternoon and people who worked there (including Margaret) were talking about it. I immediately thought of Kelly. I called her. Her phone seemed to ring one thousand times before she answered it. Having caught an earlier PATH out of Newark Penn Station, she had been through the World Trade Center and already on whatever subway she took to head north to home when the bomb went off.
Thirty years later, on this day, I think of my great law school friend, Kelly Symons, and I think that the best slice of pizza I never ate was the one eschewed on that cold, wet February Friday all those years ago. Proof positive that Don Henley was right, in a New York minute everything can change.
-AK
