I lived in a little suburb of Fort Worth, Texas called Watauga.
I was a self-employed computer game programmer.
I was working on a little game-editor called "Ducky Builder" for an up-coming series of games called "Duck Tiles"
I was expecting my first child to be born in late February of the next year. I was looking forward to the sonogram next week that might clue us in to the baby's gender.
I was dropping my van off at the local repair-shop to have 'em look at a possible electrical problem.
I was listening to "The Howard Stern Show", which broadcasts from NY, but on an hour delay to D/FW, so I didn't know about it until an hour later.
I was wearing my gray "The Code Zone" T-shirt that some friends made for me.
When I got home and turned on CNN, I saw the second tower fall live. As it fell, my brain kept trying to convince me it was just a movie special effect. It wasn't.
I wanted to scream until my throat bled. I wanted to throw rocks at the stars.
I stood numbly in the line at the blood-center for six hours. Not out of a sense of heroism, but to let me do something productive, as I knew I could do nothing else today.
Shelly couldn't give blood, being pregnant, so she spent the afternoon collecting trash and emptying the wastebaskets in the blood center.
I thought about how my child will only know of the World Trade Center in "before" pictures and on a monument like the one I saw in Oklahoma City a couple of years ago.
This is the snapshot of my life on one of the darkest days in American history. Except for the color of my T-shirt, I don't think I'll forget any of this.
