For the longest time, I never fully had an understanding of how people could say they would never forget how the whole country stopped and how they would always remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard that John F. Kennedy assassinated. Then again, I was a one-year old when that happened. So, I really wasn’t in a position to understand what went down back in 1963.

That all changed for me on September 11, 2001 – as I will never forget that day, everyone’s reaction, and where I was, etc., just as those older than me remember their details around hearing the news on President Kennedy.

At that time, my office was in Little Falls, New Jersey. However, my job duties back then also required me to spend some time in our Fort Lee, New Jersey, office as well – and that’s where I was on the morning of September 11, 2001. This office was located at the foot of the George Washington Bridge – and it offered an excellent view of New York City.

It just so happened that I had two tickets to the Yankees game that evening. But, days earlier, I had decided to sell them to a co-worker there (who I did not know well at the time) named Russ. (He was a friend of my friend, Bill – and that’s how our connection worked.) The plan was for me to see Russ later in the morning and give him the Yankee tickets for the game later that night.

Whenever I would work in Fort Lee, I would “hotel” in an office of someone who was out that day – plugging in my laptop to their LAN connection, using their phone, etc. On this morning, I was using the office of someone that I knew, Dan, as he was in Texas at a client meeting.

Just a few minutes before 9 AM EST, one of the department’s admin assistants, Kathy, who I was friendly with, came into Dan’s office and said to me “A plane just few into the Twin Towers. Some of us are going up to the top floor to get a better look at it. Do you want to come?”

At that time, Kathy and I – as well as others crowded around the windows – thought that it was a two-seater plane or something that got lost and hit the Towers. We really didn’t think it was a serious thing – and we figured it was more of a small, yet buzz-worthy, news story at the time. However, as we were watching the smoke rise from the tower, someone came by and said that they just heard on the radio that another plane had just flown into the Towers. And, at that moment, we all knew that this was much more than just a freak accident.

I’ll spare you the details about what happened in the office over the next few hours – as we learned about the Pentagon and more details that came in about the World Trade Center. But, it was chaos – to say the least. As things started to go insane, I decided it was time to get out of there and get back home – as quickly as possible – and urged my wife (who was working on Staten Island at the time) to do the same.

Needless to say, I never met up with Russ to sell him those Yankees tickets.

Like most of the country, I was hit hard by what happened on September 11th. I had worked in (what became known as) the Deutsche Bank Building from 1989 through 1997. So, I had spent quite a bit of time in, and around, the World Trade Center. And, I had a number of friends who were still in that area when the planes hit. But, more so, as an American and a human being, I felt violated, scared, and incredibly sad at that time – and it was a feeling that I could not shake for the next five days. In fact, each day, I seemed to get more and more depressed over it.

The weekend that followed the attack, my wife and decided that we needed to get away from the television – as all the news reports were just feuling our feelings and emotions at that time. So, we decided to see the movie “Hardball” which had just come out. And, it actually helped to break the pattern that we were in and help reset our mood towards something other than great sadness.

In the end, I never did anything with the tickets for the Yankees game scheduled for September 11th – other than keep them. I could have gone to the make-up game. Or, I could have sold them to someone else to use. But, I just felt it was important to keep those tickets, intact, as a reminder, of September 11, 2001. And, I still have them saved. Sure, it meant eating $74 (back then) – but, that just didn’t seem like it mattered.

Now it’s seven years after September 11, 2001. This means that there’s a whole generation of kids out there, ages eleven and younger, who probably feel the same way, now, about people talking about “9-11″ the way that I felt as a younger person when people would talk about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This includes my kids who were born in 2002 and 2004.

That’s O.K. – as I guess that’s how these things work. I just hope that something else doesn’t come along, the way “9-11″ did for me, to give them the persepctive that I later gained around the J.F.K. thing. And, I’d like to be the last Yankee fan out there who has saved tickets from a game to mark the event of something tragic that happened that day. Now, that’s something to root for in Yankeeland, today, and all days going forward.