The day I saw the towers fall, I never thought I’d plant wine grapes in their place.
I’d been called for jury duty and after failing to find a legal spot for my dead mother’s Cadillac near my bachelor pad in Greenwich Village, I threw up my hands, prayed to the parking ticket gods and headed toward the C train. A flaming orange hole in Tower One greeted me when I turned onto Sixth Avenue.
“Don’t take the subway,” a friend who’d been in the 1993 Trade Center bombing advised me when I called her from a payphone. I threw up my hands and set off on foot. At Canal Street, a boom and an acrid plume poured out of Tower Two.
“Those two buildings are connected,” a cabby at a filling station said knowingly. “A fire in one spreads to the other.” Got it. On to jury duty!
It soon became clear that everyone else was heading in the opposite direction. As I neared the part of town that would by the afternoon be called “Ground Zero,” a cop stopped me.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
“I have jury duty,” I said, producing my summons.
“You know what? Jury dismissed.”
I came home to find a parking ticket on my dead mother’s Cadillac. I turned to look back south and saw Tower One fall in real time. I went inside and checked the “not guilty” box on the parking ticket and on its back wrote
This Article was originally published on Wine Enthusiast
