GREENWICH - Every year on September 11, Ed Dadakis drives to the waterfront park at Greenwich Point to read an essay he wrote about how he avoided death that day.
He pulls out the detailed, seven-page essay that explains why he missed a morning meeting in his office on the 105th floor of New York City's World Trade Center, which collapsed in the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor.
The terrorist attacks cast a pall over the entire nation, but it struck particularly hard in Greenwich - the town with the highest casualties among Connecticut's 169 cities and towns. Overall, 12 Greenwich residents and 14 others who either grew up here or had ties to the town perished. The attacks shook the nation to its core and set off a rapid chain of events for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Citizens around the world were shaken, but here in Greenwich, the impact still lingers today.
The re-reading of the essay serves as an annual reminder for Dadakis at a beach with a direct view of the Manhattan skyline. As an employee at Aon Corp., Dadakis was scheduled to make an important presentation in his office in the south tower at 8 a.m. over the telephone to an insurance client in Malaysia - halfway around the globe. But after working late on the night of September 10, Dadakis suddenly decided that he would instead participate in the conference call from his home in Greenwich.
The last-minute decision saved his life.
When terrorists crashed a plane into the south tower, 176 of Dadakis's fellow Aon insurance employees perished.
"I'm lucky to be alive,'' Dadakis said in an interview. "Things were building up for me to be there at that time. I do realize I'm pretty lucky. ... I was told that the message had gotten out that I had died. I was supposed to be there. There was all this confusion as to who had lived and who had died. It took days before it was sorted out.''
Now, 10 years later, Dadakis still thinks regularly about that fateful day.
"I read it every September 11. I want to remember what happened,'' Dadakis said. "It's something in the background all the time. It was cataclysmic. It was life-changing. It was the defining moment of our generation. It was our Pearl Harbor.''