Back in 1978, Irene and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary with a big blowout. I’d just gotten a massive freelance paycheck—for The Captain Midnight Book of Sports, Health and Nutrition, I think—and I decided to spend almost all of the proceeds on our special day. In the evening, we had a rented Rolls Royce, orchestra tickets to the then-hit Broadway show On the Twentieth Century, dinner reservations at the reopened Stork Club, and a suite at the Plaza Hotel overlooking Central Park.

But the fun had actually started earlier in the day, when we picked up the Best Man and the Maid of Honor in a stretch limo and took them for lunch at … Windows on the World, the restaurant which had once operated on top of the north tower of the World Trade Center.

This photo was snapped during that lunch. I see it whenever I look up my computer screen. And when I do, I remember that we can never go back.

And I remember why.