We had an entire floor to do at the Ridgeway Hotel in Memphis. I was running the job and it was in good shape. The deadline was that Friday and we would make that with ease. There were, of course, televisions in every room and I hoped my guys would work and not involve themselves in game shows all morning. We had no idea how those televisions would change our lives that day.

Someone came into the room I was working in and told me to put on CNN. A plane had just crashed into a building in New York.

My God! How could that happen?

We stopped to watch the drama. We speculated on how a pilot could make such a mistake. Was it a small plane with a novice at the yoke? What about all those poor people in their offices, working, minding their business. How many victims could there be? What an unfortunate tragedy! You just never know...

Then the second plane hit. This was no longer an accident.

I turned to Mr. Minor, a combat Marine veteran of Vietnam.

"We're at war. With who?" He did not answer. He had a thousand yard stare in his eyes.

We had to get back to work. Just had to. Our hearts and minds were in New York but we had work to do. Soon, important people came on the job. We didn't have until Friday anymore. Memphis International Airport was shut down, stranding thousands of passengers and every hotel room in Memphis was needed, NOW. Lou and Rodney came in from the shop. This job had to be done today and they promised me more men. The prissy hotel manager came upstairs to demand that the work be done NOW. We couldn't pull off. The nature of the beast of construction is that you do what you can, sometimes getting ahead of yourself and so, few of the rooms were ready for occupancy. The mornings initial dilemma, that the half the paint delivered was the wrong shade, needed to be addressed. Lou made the call to paint the rooms on one side the correct shade, the other side the wrong shade. Whatever. The building was either going to be remodeled in a year or demolished. Who would care? It just HAD to be done, NOW.

Hotel security decided to give us all name tags. Jose Arrellano, my Mexican friend, was the first to get one. They hadn't seen fit to question his citizenship, I thought. It's funny what people think- and don't think about- in times of crisis. Jose handed me my name tag.

I didn't exactly get extra help. I got two men to replace the two who left at three thirty. Their day was done. If we were, in fact, at war, I asked Lou, could I shoot them for desertion? In all seriousness he replied, "No".

With the help of the men who stayed and the men who joined, we got the job done. Housekeeping came on and cleaned up our mess as we moved along. We had stayed apprised of the horrific events on TV and heard all the facts and rumors as we worked to make shelter for our fellow Americans. The horrible carnage was replayed over and over. Someone had done a horrible, cowardly thing to our country and we were angry and afraid. There had been nothing we could do about it but our jobs.

The hotel manager reappeared to verify that we were done. I think it was around nine o'clock that night. He immediately noticed that the rooms on either side were different colors. He was not happy about this. Not at all.

"Motherfucker", I said to him, "there maybe 20,000 people dead in New York City and you fucking care that the colors are wrong?!"

He objected to me talking to him like that. My next trick might have been to slug him so, to avoid that I threw up my hands in contempt and walked away. If I didn't have a job the next day because of that, it was a job I didn't need to have. There seemed to be more important concerns in the world...

I had ridden to work with Harry that September morning. We got in his truck and rode away in silence into the night. We didn't want to talk about prissy managers, buildings tumbling down in fire and smoke or unseen, unknown enemies. We wanted to get drunk.

We stopped at a gas station for 12 packs. The price of gas was now $5 per gallon. I would NEVER patronize that store again. But, we got our beer. And 14 hours and four beers into the worst day in our american history, I went to sleep wondering, fearing, what kind of a world I would wake up to.