Amid the thousands

of tragic personal stories that have surfaced during the past two weeks

from the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York, there are hundreds

of stories with happy endings, even miracle endings.

Judith Erven's

story is one of the happy ones.

A special education

teacher at Whitewater Middle School, she was sick at home Sept. 11 and

watching a morning news show when she heard about an airliner hitting

the first tower. Since her son, Jim, works in the other tower, that got

her immediate attention.

She called

her daughter Amanda, a student at the University of Georgia, and they

were talking on the phone when they saw the second tower struck. That

changed everything.

"All we

could do was wait," Amanda later wrote in an e-mail to friends and

family that her mother forwarded to The Citizen. "We all watched

as those amazing 110-story buildings crumbled to the ground.

"At 10:36

a.m. my phone rang. Faintly I heard the voice on the line 'Mandy ... Mandy

...' my heart stopped. Never in my life have I felt such joy. My brother

had made it out."

Jim, an assistant

vice president in the bond department at Morgan Stanley, worked on the

70th floor of the second tower. Ironically, he was also on the job when

the towers were bombed in 1993, and everyone walked down the stairs to

safety.

This time was

a bit different. Workers in his office heard a sort of sonic boom, like

a plane flying too close, when the first tower was hit. Then they saw

papers flying outside their windows as they were evacuated. Time for one

more trip down the stairs.

At about the

45th floor, word came that everything seemed to be all right, and some

were even told to return to their offices. According to his mother, Jim

and an associate looked at each other and said, "I don't think so."

They kept going down.

About two floors

later, they were thrown against the walls and the entire building shook

as if a massive earthquake had hit Manhattan. "They thought they

were goners," Judith said.

Jim and his

associate hurried down the stairs and raced to the subway, which took

them from the southern end of Manhattan to Morgan Stanley's midtown offices.

There they were greeted by stunned looks on the faces of their coworkers.

That was when they found out that their tower had collapsed approximately

six minutes after they got out.

While the entire

family rejoices in Jim's survival, his mother says he is not ready to

leave New York. Morgan Stanley was very fortunate only 14 are still missing

out of some 3,500 employees, and only one that Jim knew personally has

not been accounted for.

Meanwhile,

everyone has gone