There is a beautiful maple tree that turns red before all of the other trees around it at the corner of Shady Oak Road and Opus Center. I found that strangely emotional a decade ago as I pulled away from my job at Musicland. We had verified that all of our employees and customers in the Sam Goody at the base of the World Trade Center had been safely evacuated before the collapse. Whatever gratitude there was to be found in that was missing in my heart. I picked up my sons form school and showed them how far away New York City and Washington were from Minnesota to ease their concerns. Or mine.
Eventually I heard from my parents who told me they were fine on their vacation to Mount Rushmore. But the Park Service closed the Memorial and they were waiting out the crisis in a hotel in South Dakota glued to CNN.
Back at work, I was informed that we were insured for the loss of the store. There had never been such an event on our books. We had never closed a store at a complete loss with all inventory destroyed. I picked up my sales report. The total sales would be asterisked for a year as to whether the World Trade Center store was in or out of the comp store sales total. Just to help people remember. But no one ever will forget.