Of all the close calls that day — all the people who never reached the World Trade Center because of a flat tire, a missed train or a case of the chickenpox — perhaps none was as stunningly close, or as bittersweet, as Joe Lott's.

To this day, few have heard how the gift of a necktie saved his life.

Meet him now, and you'd see he favors colorful ties splashed with the warm reds, soothing yellows and cheerful blues of Impressionist paintings.

You'd have no way of knowing this is his quiet way of honoring Elaine and his other lost colleagues.

He prefers to keep that private, saying the explanation would be too much of a conversation-stopper:

"I'm wearing an art tie for dead people."

THEY WERE CO-WORKERS at Compaq, the computer company, scheduled to attend a conference at Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center. They were a "virtual" team. Joe, then 51, was based in Arlington, Va., where he still lives. His four colleagues worked from home or Midtown Manhattan.

At age 56, project manager Elaine was a classic New Yorker who reveled in showing visitors the real city, not just the tourist version. A Manhattanite, she delighted in shepherding them to Chinatown or her favorite kosher deli.

She’d stood in line that spring to nab tickets to "The Producers" for Joe, his wife, Debby, and one of his daughters. She’d gotten him into a 7 a.m. members-only preview at the American Museum of Natural History. "She mothered everybody," Joe says.

Barbara Shaw, from Morris Township, was a marketing expert always bursting with news of her 2-year-old grandson. Susan Huie, from Fair Lawn, was a financial analyst active in her evangelical church in Chinatown. Rounding out the team was burly, bearded Brian Magee, from Long Island, a Harley-Davidson owner whose biker image disguised a brilliant mind for overseeing large computer projects.

The weather had been awful in the country’s midsection the day before. Joe’s flight from Dallas ended up taking 14 hours, so it was well past midnight when he finally checked into the Marriott hotel tucked between the twin towers.

He’d had to cancel a dinner with Elaine, but they still needed to confer. She’d added slides to the presentation he was making in the morning on electronic payment systems. If Joe, her boss, wasn’t going to look like an idiot, she had to show him the changes.

"I was a little nervous about it," he says.

They decided to squeeze in a breakfast meeting at the hotel’s restaurant. The Marriott was connected to the north tower, so they were only a 60-second walk away.

He awoke to discover the long flight had left his white shirt too wrinkled to wear, so he threw on the only other clean shirt he had, a pastel green one.

At breakfast, Elaine swept in and gave him her signature hug.

It was 7:20 a.m.

Joe and Elaine got down to business, taking about 40 minutes to go through the revisions. Barbara stopped by briefly and quickly left for the 106th floor to meet Susan.

When they finished their work, Elaine did something unexpected — she handed him a gift-wrapped present. He was momentarily confused: It wasn’t his birthday.

Once he unwrapped the tissue paper, though, it made perfect sense.

It was a necktie of Claude Monet’s "Sunset at Lavacourt," capturing that moment when the sinking sun sets the sky aflame in fiery scarlet and purple.

Elaine knew about Joe’s appreciation for art-inspired ties.

Because his work required a lot of travel, Joe took the opportunity to broaden his horizons by going to the art museums of the major cities he visited.

The son of a butcher and beautician, he enlisted in the Marines at 18. By the time he retired, he was an Auburn-educated industrial engineer with the rank of major.

"I’d spent 21 years in the Marines. I didn’t know beans about art," Joe says. But drawn to the Impressionists, he taught himself the difference between a Monet and a Van Gogh, a Degas and a Gauguin.

Often he’d buy a museum tie, then hold "artist identification" quizzes for his three daughters when they were growing up.

So when Elaine spotted the tie on a trip to the Berkshires, she bought it for him.

"When I saw the tie, I thought of you," Joe says she told him that morning. "I wanted you to have it."

ACTS OF KINDNESS

Elaine did that all the time — remembered people’s hobbies, bought them unexpected trinkets when antiquing, sent cards for no reason beyond the fact that someone would get a kick out of it.

She didn’t relegate co-workers to a compartment marked "9 to 5." At a conference with colleagues in Atlantic City, she’d spent her free time not in her hotel room, but teaching the first-timers how to gamble.

Joe examined his gift. "That’s a beautiful tie," he told her. "I think I’ll wear it."

Cheerfully blunt, she shot back: "You’d better not wear it with that shirt." Its pale green wouldn’t do justice to Monet’s vibrant hues.

It was 8:25 a.m. They left the restaurant.

The conference was starting in five minutes. Joe could have just stuffed the gift in a briefcase, forgetting all about it until later.

But he felt he owed her more than a thank you.

"I liked Elaine," he says. "And she’d done something nice for me."

Swapping shirts would be inconvenient, but after all, he reasoned, it wouldn’t be a big deal if he were a few minutes late. As they approached the elevators, he made a tiny, split-second decision.

"You know, I think I’ll go back and change my shirt," he announced to Elaine. "I’ve got a white shirt I could wear."

An elevator arrived. They quickly parted company and went their separate ways:

Joe to his room.

Elaine to the north tower.

He hadn’t ironed a shirt in years, but it’s a skill that never deserts a good Marine. He set up the big ironing board and got to work. At one point, Elaine called from the conference to tell him which bank of elevators to use. He thanked her and said he’d be right up.

Once done, he donned the freshly pressed shirt still warm from the ironing board. He carefully put on his new Monet tie. The white shirt with his brown suit and the tie’s forceful reds? It worked.

Then, for some reason he still can’t explain, he repacked his suitcase even though he planned to spend another night there.

Finally, he started out the door.

The hotel shook. He ran to the window. Although he couldn’t make sense of what he saw — floating debris, fleeing people and a dead body — it prompted him to evacuate. He learned about the plane in a quick call to his wife.

He grabbed his suitcase and computer and left. After making his way through the bedlam of the lobby, which was mobbed with evacuees from the tower, he headed south.

Much of what he saw or did over the next several hours was shared by thousands of others. The mesmerizing horror. The confusion. The crowd groaning with one voice at what it witnessed. At one point, a woman to one side of him was crying and praying. A man on his other side was cursing.

As he stared at the smoking north tower, he alternated between concluding his four colleagues couldn’t possibly survive that fire, and waiting for … yearning for … trying to will into existence a helicopter to rescue them.

STAYING THE COURSE

Joe had never seen a day of combat as a Marine, but his military training had drummed this into him: Have a plan. Execute your plan. Don’t just run around.

Nearly all his decisions over the next several hours were practical, with this exception: He never ditched his suitcase.

It meant that when he encountered an elderly man who’d left the hotel wearing a three-piece suit but no shoes, Joe was able to reach into that suitcase to give the man his spare loafers.

He didn’t even abandon his bag when he saw debris from the collapsed tower barrelling toward him with the force of a tidal wave.

"I was really terrified. I ran for my life," he says. Engulfed by the ash-blanketed darkness, he heard the lapping water of the Hudson River and realized he was in Battery Park and could go no farther. He pulled his suit jacket over his face to breathe.

When the dust cleared, he looked up to a startling sight: someone he knew. It was Joe Mazzetti, a guy from Princeton who’d collaborated with Compaq on various jobs, who was there with a few co-workers. The two Joes greeted each other like orphans separated at birth.

"He looked a wreck," Joe Mazzetti recalls. "He was shell-shocked in a way that was not hard to see."

Eventually they took the Staten Island Ferry, then walked until someone at a New York Housing Authority office invited them in. They ate a bit, wiped the grit from their faces, watched the news and called home.

When they heard the Bayonne Bridge was open to pedestrians, Joe paid a guy 40 bucks to drive them to it. By now, it was late afternoon.

"The whole time I’m thinking, ‘I must be the only one who made it,’ " Joe says now. Yet he still nurtured wisps of unlikely hope: Maybe Brian, the computer guy, had been late. Maybe Susan had gone downstairs for a bagel.

It was hard to hold out hope for Elaine. He knew she had already reached the 106th floor when she called him while he was ironing.

It was then, at the crest of the bridge, that his cell phone was able to receive its first incoming call since the attack.

It was Brian’s son, asking, "Where’s my dad?" Joe didn’t know what to say, so he told the truth: He didn’t know.

"This is when everything hit me," he says. "I just instinctively knew that none of them had made it out," he says. "I hung up and I started to cry. And I cried all the way across the bridge."

He didn’t stop walking — still dragging his rolling suitcase — nor did his companions pause to console him. The wind whipped in from Newark Bay, buffeting their little group as it trudged along, Joe silently weeping.

AN ODYSSEY

It was evening when they finally arrived in Princeton, traveling by bus, then a car service. That night, the two Joes drank the better part of a bottle of single-malt Scotch whisky. The next morning, Joe rented a car and headed home.

On the drive, he received a call from Compaq’s CEO, Michael Capellas, the man at the helm of the 40,000-employee company. Five of Capellas’ employees were killed in the attack — the fifth was on the plane that was flown into the north tower. Capellas spent 45 minutes talking to Joe even though they’d never met.

The Star-Ledger's images of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center 34 Gallery: The Star-Ledger's images of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center

"He knew they were dead," Joe recalls. "He began to counsel me. Most of the talk was him telling me I shouldn’t be blaming myself. He was talking me through what he knew was going to be survivor’s guilt."

But the phone call could not rescue Joe from the powerful pull of guilt. Whenever he let down his guard in the months that followed, a thought hissed, "If it hadn’t been for me, they wouldn’t have been there."

Seen in military terms, he was the ranking officer there that day. It was his presentation the other four were there to support. To someone who’d spent two decades in the Marine command structure, it might have felt no different than if he’d sent his squad into an ambush.

He took no time off and turned down the company’s offer of counseling.

Around November, a package arrived from the elderly man who’d borrowed his shoes that day. It was the loafers, freshly shined, along with a new pair of socks and a thank-you note.

Looking back, Joe says he had a difficult three or four months.

His wife, listening to his account, gently offers a different timetable: "He had a rough five years."

He adopted a "life is short" philosophy: "Suddenly I was having a cocktail every night, which is unusual for me," he says. "If I wanted dessert, I ate dessert." Within a year or so, he’d put on 30 pounds.

Lots of people tried to console him by saying his miraculous survival was "meant to be," or "God’s plan."

"Everyone felt compelled to tell me I had been spared ‘for a reason,’ " he says. "What amazed me was everyone else’s need to justify why I lived."

Their comments just made his guilt worse: "I didn’t feel I’d been picked for any ‘bigger purpose.’ I should’ve been with them, and I wasn’t. I couldn’t understand why they died and I lived."

For the first three anniversaries of the attack, he returned to New York with his wife to retrace the steps of that day. It was his attempt to invent a way to honor his friends, borrowing a page from the Marines: "Normally that’s something old soldiers do on the battlefield."

When the guilt surfaced, he’d apply this logic like a salve, repeating it as often as necessary: "I didn’t do anything that caused them to die."

One year, he lit candles for them at the local Unitarian church. Eventually he adopted a different ritual of spending the day quietly, alone.

Four years ago, he took early retirement to try his hand at residential real estate. He joined the Rotary Club, throwing himself into volunteer work so enthusiastically he’s already in his second term as his club’s president. His eating and drinking settled down; he’s still working on those extra pounds.

He made another quiet change. Now, he wears only art ties. It’s his way of keeping his lost colleagues in his thoughts. "They were all wonderful people," he says. "To this day, I miss them."

And Elaine’s tie? He wears it when he gives a speech to the Rotary about 9/11.

He also wore it on one other occasion when, as the father of the bride, he walked his daughter down the aisle.

Ten years later, he is at peace with the "what ifs" that pepper his tale. What if bad weather hadn’t delayed his flight? He would’ve received the tie at dinner instead of at breakfast. What if a nameless baggage handler had been more careful? His shirt might not have required ironing.

Yet those are mere quirks of fate compared with this certainty: A tie, a gift so ordinary it is often disparaged, even mocked, made the final difference. And that tie didn't leap into Joe's possession of its own accord. It was given to him by a specific, special person.

So when they read the names of the deceased Sunday, listen as they recite the G's for the woman who saved a life just by being herself: Elaine Myra Greenberg.

And when they reach the L's, pause as well to consider the name you won't hear because of her: Joseph Nathaniel Lott.