Ten Years Ago

(Note: This post is part of a series of articles by various writers organized by my friend Tyge O'Donnell. I urge anyone interested to read them all at his site, The Neon Lounge.)

Ten years ago, my wife and I owned a house in Noe Valley, our kids were 7, 5 and 3; and I had a great job as founding editor of a new city magazine. There were dark clouds on the horizon, however, with the dot-com implosion, and stress lines in our marriage.

Still, when I woke up that morning of September 11, 2001, I had plenty of reasons to be hopeful about the future. The city where we chose to live, San Francisco, has endured a endless series of booms and busts since the Gold Rush Era, and people here know nothing if not how to be resilient.

I was getting ready to head downtown when my wife heard the report of a plane hitting the World Trade Center on NPR. She called out to me to turn on our TV, which was located in my basement office to prevent the kids from exposure to its presumed evils.

Rushing into my office, I left the door open while I snapped on the TV. Our seven-year-old son quietly entered behind me, just as the second plane smashed into the second tower.

I heard his gasp, turned and swept him out of the room. He went upstairs, got a piece of construction paper and drew the image that appears at the top of this post.

***

It took weeks for life to resume any sort of normal rhythm. Barry Bonds was having the greatest home-run hitting season in baseball history, but all sports contests were suspended for a while.

Tourism came to an end, and with that development, the city slowed to a crawl. There was no one in the restaurants that normally would be packed, and the hotels were empty.

City magazines exist by selling ad space to local businesses. Ours, which had launched literally a week before 9/11, now looked to be dead on arrival. After a series of crisis meetings, the small group of us who had launched it decided we would cut back production to every other month, defer our salaries, and accept trade as opposed to cash for ad space in the book.

That fall and winter and the next spring were extremely difficult, both for the magazine, for the city, and for me. I had to take out a huge equity loan to keep paying the house payments, and all of the strains evident before 9/11 worsened in its wake.

While many dot-com companies had survived the stock market bubble that had started popping in April 2000, now the entire first wave of web-based startups started failing left and right, and it turned into an economic disaster for this region.

Tourists stayed away in droves, and it was deep into 2002 before the core element of the city's economy began a fitful recovery. By then, I had been forced to leave the magazine for a position as a visiting professor at Stanford, where the plan was for me to write a book.

***

By remembering all of this, I do not wish to imply any causal relationship between 9/11 and the chaos that visited my world, because it's all much more complicated than that. Besides, others suffered far worse pains than I did, including a friend and former colleague whose sister was killed when the plane hit the Pentagon.

But through a series of setbacks, I eventually found myself without that house, without that marriage, and without what until then had been an extremely successful career as a journalist.

Over the years since, in most ways, life has proved to be a much more difficult challenge than it had previously been. In most ways, it continues to prove more difficult year by year.

I won't chronicle the losses, disappointments, or the many crushed dreams. Many, many people have been struggling mightily in this historical adjustment of the U.S. national economy as it integrates into a global economy where "we" have far less leverage over our economic fate than when U.S. hegemony was clearer, and less under assault from aggressive centers of growth overseas.

But there are many bright spots around here and I post about them week after week. San Francisco is the center of another tech boom, bringing waves of entrepreneurial innovation to the rest of the world, like we always do when on top.

I'm chronicling that boom for the very magazine that I helped launch a decade ago.

The little boy who drew that sad picture on 9/11 is now a junior in high school, and all-city soccer star, and coach of a younger girls' team that yesterday won their opening game, 1-0.

There are flowers blooming in the garden out back, and somewhere way up in an apple tree, I can hear the sweet sound of a pair of birds singing...

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