The London gallery owner chose not to dine alone at Windows on the World located on the 102nd floor of the North Tower. It was a fortunate choice; no one in the restaurant at 8:46 that fateful morning survived. The following week, Grant’s London friend, now back home, sent him a note that concluded, “I imagine the only reason we’re both alive today is that you and Barbara decided to marry on September 11, 1996. I know for certain I will always remember your wedding anniversary!”
In the years after the tragedy the city recovered, but Grant and Barbara never entirely did. The tragedy changed them forever. While not directly in harm’s way, the proximity to the event left them both with an odd sense of survivors’ guilt. They would never know how many of the tragedy’s victims they’d sat next to at a lunch counter, a coffee shop, or passed on the street in the weeks, months and even years before that dark day. The thought of missing neighbors with whom they never thought to exchange a nod, a small smile, or any form of recognition, haunted both of them. Precious souls ignored, anonymous, and now vanished forever.
With each person Randolph watched placing a picture on a door or a lamppost of a loved one, he thought of Barbara doing the same if he had not turned down that breakfast invitation.
Both he and Barbara had always enjoyed casual evening cocktails, but alcohol after that tragic day became a refuge for both of them. A place where they could put life’s disappointments aside and find peace in the soft embrace of a stiff drink.
The sentiment, “We’re here today and gone tomorrow,” they repeated often to each other when hesitating for a moment about mixing that second, or third, cocktail.
As for the gallery and the surrounding area, life went on. Profits soon returned and then kept heading upward—bigger and better than either of them ever imagined.
More than a decade after 9/11, Grant and his partners got an offer to purchase their business that was too outlandish to refuse. Grant, blessed with an uncanny sense of timing, chose as well to sell many of the art pieces he had acquired over the past fifteen years. He sold off all but his personal favorites and parked the profits in a low-risk cash management fund until he and Barbara could decide what to do with their lives.
Unofficially retired and still relatively young, Grant suggested they take a road trip along the California coast. It was May, a perfect time for the two of them to enjoy this picturesque part of America.
In their professional lives, they had visited Los Angeles and San Francisco on several occasions. But neither of them had taken the time to enjoy and explore California’s coast. They started at the busy beaches and yacht-filled harbors of San Diego and La Jolla and took all the time they wanted heading north.
They passed the mansions of Montecito and strolled along Stearns Wharf in the town of Santa Barbara. They stopped at the old mission city of San Luis Obispo, and the small coastal town of Los Osos on Morro Bay. They were wowed by the old Hearst Castle in San Simeon and held their breaths as they proceeded along the winding and treacherous curves of Highway 1 between San Simeon and Big Sur.
They stopped at Nepenthe, a restaurant that hugged a cliff south of Carmel, for an early dinner while they took in incredible ocean views from the restaurant’s expansive outdoor patio.
After enjoying the adjacent communities of Monterey, Carmel-by-the-Sea, and Pacific Grove, they spent three days on the Sonoma Coast, north of San Francisco. Nearly three weeks into their trip, they parked their car along a deserted two-mile stretch of beach, north of Fort Bragg and south of the small town of Westport, in Mendocino County. Walking barefoot, enjoying a warm sun and a crisp breeze, Grant looked out and caught the unforgettable view of an enormous gray whale breaching out in the blue Pacific, perhaps no more than two hundred yards from the spot where they stood. Less than a minute later, he and Barbara, at the same time, said, “Did you see that—” as a second whale, also traveling south to north, breached as well.
They spread a small blanket and sat down on the dry, warm sand. For nearly an hour, Grant and Barbara held each other while they watched a parade of whales putting on a show just for them. Later, at a bed and breakfast inn they had booked in Westport for their last night on the coast, they learned about what they had seen. "That was a feeding frenzy for krill by a pod of gray whales making their spring migration from Mexico’s Baja Peninsula to the Gulf of Alaska," the small hotel's operator explained. “You could wait years to see a show like that. You were just at the right place at the right time.”
It was that night, sitting on the porch outside their bedroom, listening to the relentless waves of the Pacific hitting the shore and looking up at a star-covered sky, that the Randolphs decided to leave the East Coast for the West Coast. The next morning at breakfast, their appetites driven by new possibilities, they began planning their move.
They quickly decided that they would look for a home in the Bay Area. But while they had made several visits to San Francisco for studio openings, they didn’t know much about the communities around the world-famous city. They resolved to take whatever time they needed to learn about the East Bay, South Bay, and North Bay before making a choice.
Traveling back south to San Francisco along Highway 128, they made several stops at wineries along the Anderson and Alexander valleys. By the time they reached the
