The cigarette machine, September 10th, 2001

In the late Summer of 2001 my wife and I were on vacation in Europe. After driving all evening from Italy to Western Austria, we stopped at a roadside “Gasthaus” to sleep for 6 hours. The basement of the lodge contained the only open bar in the hamlet where we had stopped, so my wife and I went downstairs to have a beer before bed.

While sitting at the bar my wife asked me “What city is that?”, pointing to the cigarette machine near the door. The backlit front of the machine showed a twilight scene of lower Manhattan, with the World Trade Center dominating the picture. “That’s New York”, I said, “looks like the picture was taken from New Jersey or Ellis Island”. My wife had never been to NYC, though I had been there mabye two dozen times in the early ’90’s, back when Times Square was pretty scary after dark.

So here, in a bar in the center of Europe, is a cigarette machine with a giant picture of Manhattan. No “Marlboro” or any other logo, just a picture of the skyline. Considering there’s a postcard view out of every window in Austria, maybe a city skyline would be a nice change. Maybe the cigerette machines in NYC have pictures of Austria, I mused.

We finished our beers and headed back to the room. We had another two hours of driving to Zurich in the morning, after that a flight back to Dallas.

It was just after midnight Central European Time, September 11th, 2001. The World Trade Center had slightly more than 12 hours left to stand.