I didn’t need to turn on the news to catch the breaking story about a 25-story crane collapse in midtown that’s now killed two so far and counting. Because my father and my stepmother called me, at 2:25, having just witnessed it. It was so close to them I could hear the ambulances and rescue vehicles start to arrive in the background.

It was so close that my stepmother had passed by the site 30 seconds earlier.

I told my father that I had never heard him so shaken up, not even on 9/11. “That’s because,” he said, “I didn’t see 9/11 myself.”

And then he added, “Like you did.”

Ran right home and kissed my children.