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Jack Daniels on 9/11
The first time I ever drank Jack Daniels whiskey was also my last. 18 years ago today in Brooklyn, New York, I found myself drinking it just a couple of hours after the World Trade Center had been attacked and destroyed, just a few miles away. Ian and I had stood on the rooftop of our apartment building looking at the familiar skyline of lower Manhattan and seen with our own eyes a plane flying into the second tower, and then, a few minutes later both towers disappearing into a cloud of smoke. The shock was gradual, slowly taking hold of our reason. This didn’t seem like an accident, and we wanted to find out what was going on.
What else would we do but think of the company of friends, and maybe a strong drink. We had no Whatsapp or smart phones to converge in a virtual space and express our shock, share rumours. Whatever dial-up internet we had at home was either knocked out or just jammed with panicked traffic. We had managed to get an email to my sister out in Long Island to say we were fine and she passed the word around the family. But from that point on, the universe of Brooklyn, that huge but separate part of New York, closed in around us. We had no tv, no radio (our local station had its antenna on top of the towers) and learned quickly that we weren’t meant to travel anywhere. Subways and buses were stopped to stop people moving around. The sky above us went eerily silent as the airspace was…
