My wife is reading from her diary for the week leading up to September 11, 2001.

World Trade Center was hosting a dance series. We saw Twyla Tharp and Ballet Trockadero on separate evenings.

Our one year old loved to walk around the courtyard, up and over benches circling the fountain and the globe at its center.

The underground shops and the Borders Books in building 5 were pleasant retreats from the late summer heat. On Sept 9th, I bought a shirt from the Warners Bros. Store in the World Trade Center shops with Wiley Coyote poised to plunge the switch on a bundle of dynamite.

You could get vertigo by pressing your back against the side of one of the towers and looking up. Nothing so tall was ever so flat. No edge to the sky was ever so perpendicular. The towers were not beautiful. They weren’t natural. But they were a force of mankind and beauty flowed through, around and above them.