In honor of all the victims of the tragedy of September 11 and its aftermath, their families, and their friends.

I will always remember, as will many of us, where I was the morning of 9/11. A lucky change in job the day before kept me away from Ground Zero at the time of the attack.

I was a vice president at Merrill Lynch (before the recent debacle and sale to Bank of America). For a year, I had been commuting on the PATH train from New Jersey to the World Trade Center, arriving around 8:45 a.m. every day. I then took the escalator and sky bridge over to my office at Two World Financial Center. On Monday, September 10, 2001, I started a new position in the company’s Princeton, New Jersey office. At 8:46 a.m. on Tuesday, when the first plane hit, I was pulling into a parking lot in suburbia, not in a crowd of panicked commuters underneath the WTC. The first sign that something was amiss was when my NPR signal went out. (WNYC had a transmitter on top of the WTC.) The “could have been” occupied my thoughts for weeks.

I don’t want to overstate my experience versus those who were killed, injured, or knew those who were. It affected me, though, in more ways than I realized at the time. It is perhaps not coincidental that shortly after 9/11, Helen and I began to talk seriously about having a child, after more than eight years together. Unseized opportunities took on new immediacy. Yes, it gave us pause, wanting to bring a child into a world where “detonate” is a reflexive verb. But when we lose our faith in the future, the terrorists have already won.

May we all work in whatever way we can for a safer, more peaceful world for our children.

(The tall building with the flat black top just to the left of the WTC in the photo is Two World Financial Center, where I worked.)