The Slicer Kept Running: Remembering September 11 from Crosby’s Market
If you lived in Marblehead in late summer 2001, you know the exact rhythm of a Tuesday morning in mid-September. The heavy summer crowds had thinned out, the kids were back in school, and the harbor was settling into that quiet, crisp transition before the real New England autumn sets in.
I was working the morning shift at the deli counter inside Crosby’s Market on Washington Street.
If you’ve ever worked a neighborhood deli counter, you know it’s the heartbeat of a small coastal town. You don’t just slice roast beef and wrap turkey in butcher paper; you memorize names, kid schedules, boat repairs, and weekend gossip. You see regulars before they’ve finished their morning coffee. The soundtrack is always the same: the gentle thrum of the refrigeration units, the rhythmic whir of the meat slicers, paper tearing, and easy chatter across the glass cases.
That morning—September 11—started under the clearest, most heartbreakingly perfect blue sky you could imagine.
Around 8:50 AM, the first break in the routine happened not with a sound, but with an absence of it.
Someone came in through the sliding front doors, not grabbing a cart or basket, just looking around with a dazed expression. A few minutes later, one of my coworkers came back from the front registers and said, in a quiet, confused voice: “A plane just hit the World Trade Center in New York.”
At first, you try to fit news like that into an ordinary frame of reference. A private plane? A terrible accident? A navigation failure? We kept wiping down the prep tables. I set the gauge on the slicer and weighed cold cuts.
Then came the second plane.
Within minutes, the store changed. In a small town like Marblehead, news doesn’t travel through screens alone; it walks through the door on people’s faces. People started wandering down the aisles not shopping, but clutching their car keys, gathering in small knots in the produce section and near the bakery.
Someone brought a small, portable radio into the back room. A group of us huddled around the static-heavy broadcast, straining to understand the frantic voices of news anchors trying to make sense of the collapse of the South Tower, followed by news of the Pentagon, and then Pennsylvania.
For me, I rushed home to my small apartment, where I cried all day and night as I watched the news and watched over and over as the airlines flew into the Twin Towers.
Then came the detail that turned our blood to ice: The flights had originated out of Boston.
Logan Airport is just about fifteen miles south of Marblehead as the crow flies. We heard planes climbing into that very sky every single day. The realization that those hijacked flights—American Flight 11 and United Flight 175—had taken off from our home tarmac made the horror feel violently close. New York wasn’t an abstract metropolis across the country; it was tied to the morning runway just across the harbor.
The rest of that day blurred into a numb, surreal state. People came into Crosby’s simply because they didn’t know where else to go. Nobody wanted to be alone in their houses. Customers would order half a pound of ham, stop mid-sentence, look across the glass case at me with tears welling in their eyes, and we’d just stand there in silence. We didn’t know who was on those planes. In the North Shore commuter orbit, everyone knew people who flew to Manhattan or the West Coast for business on Tuesday mornings. Every silence felt heavy with dread.
When I stepped outside into the late afternoon sun, I was in disbelief.. That pristine blue sky—what people now call “9/11 blue”—was eerily, completely empty. The nationwide grounding of all civilian aircraft had taken effect. Living near Boston, you never realize how constantly the sky hums until every engine is silenced. The stillness over Marblehead Harbor was deafening.
Decades later, whenever September rolls around and the air gets that first crisp edge under an immaculate blue sky, my mind goes straight back to the Washington Street counter, the smell of fresh cold cuts and waxed paper, and the day an ordinary Tuesday shattered the world we knew.
A friend in my church was an American Airlines pilot. All I knew to do was pray for him. My sister was stranded in Nantucket. All I could do was pray for her.
A quiet tribute to community resilience and how small towns hold each other up is definitely due today, September 11, 2026. On the twenty fifth anniversary of this tragedy, we will never forget.