12 Minutes of Thought on the 25th Anniversary of 9/11/2026

By Lori Perkins

First of all I can’t believe it’s been 25 years.

My son was in second grade.  I had just recently left his father.

I got a call from my client, Greg Kihn, who was a radio DJ in the bay area.  I was one of the few people he knew in NYC and so he out me live on the radio. He wanted to know what I thought about the bombing of the World Trade Center.  I thought he was talking about the attempted bombing from a few years earlier.  He told me to turn on the TV. I saw the second building get hit live….and collapse.

As soon as I saw what was happening I told him I had to get off the phone and go and get my son, who thankfully went to school a block and a half from home.

I took him out of school, and met up with other mothers I knew who did the same.  We came back to my house.  The kids went into my son’s room and we grown-ups watched.

I wondered if we were at war.

My ex-husband insisted he come up and see our son.

He ended up losing his bank card that day. I think he just left it in an ATM machine.

I kept my son out of school the next day.

I remember taking him to the co-op park and constantly scanning the sky.

I felt like America, and NYC, had finally entered the world landscape of terrorism like the rest of Europe, specifically London, where the garbage cans outside Harrod’s Department store were covered because of bombs planted there by the IRA.

The next few days my son started having coughing fits and breathing problems.  Took him to his pediatrician who diagnosed him with “environmental asthma” and he used a Flonase purple inhaler for a few weeks.  Now Mayor Mandani has released troves of  the environmental documents that show the air was littered with danger.

I went downtown about a week later to meet with a publisher and I remember the air smelled  like decaying flesh, which had embedded itself everywhere.