A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-And-Fifty-Nine

On that morning, twenty years ago, I was lying in bed sleeping when my mother called me.  I was living at home, sort of.  My Grandfather had passed away and my parent's had kept possession of his apartment, which was on the same floor of the apartment building as the one where I had grown up.  The night before, I had been up late, so I wasn't really too keen on getting a phone call so early in the morning.  My mother told me that I should be watching the news, that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers.  I grunted and was getting ready to go back to sleep, but then some little part of me put together the words.  I was befuddled.  It did not seem a sensible thing to have happened.  I had to check, so I turned on the television, just in time to see the second plane make impact.  I watched as it unfolded, beginning to understand what was unfolding.  I'm not sure how long I sat there alone before I got myself together to go into my parent's apartment.

I remember a great deal from that day.  Not all of it, and not as a story, but as moments.  I remember images from the television, I remember my fear when my brother began talking about going up to the roof to see if he could get pictures of what was happening.  I remember running to a local electronics shop to buy a battery powered radio in a panic, how crowded the store was with others seeking similar emergency purchases.  I remember the crowd of people who arrived at our apartment, former coworkers of my father, still employed in the same office on Barclay Street across from one of the towers.  They had been told to stay put after the first plane hit, but fled when they realized the danger remained.  Many had ash and soot on them when they arrived.  We did not know if they would be able to make it home that night, though, somehow, they all did.

The home where I grew up, where I was living at the time, was an apartment building in Greenwich Village, a few blocks south of 14th street, in the area of the city that was cut off from traffic for the next few weeks.  The streets around our house were desolate and quiet.  I remember them being covered with paper litter, with images of the missing.  The only thing that broke that silence was sirens and the unheard of sound of jets scrambling overhead, the normal no-fly zone over Manhattan ironically intruded by those who were now charged with its protection and enforcement.  Things were eerie.  We were not, of course, in the immediate zone of impact, not in the direct area of debris and blast (though we had plenty of ash and soot by the next day), but we were close enough that we always had to have ID to get into the neighborhood and couldn't have taken our car out of the garage without being refused the right to return with it into the cordoned off zone.  

It took weeks for things to change, to begin returning to some kind of normality.  Even then, it was still strange.  I could look down the avenue and see the absence.  It stared at me from the sky outside our building.  It was not that I felt my nation had been injured, or that I wanted to get revenge.  It felt as though my home was no longer safe.  I remember the fears I had, the nightmares.  This was amped up by the anthrax scare at The National Enquirer's offices in Boca Raton, which I considered a second home, having visited the area every year of my childhood to see my grandparents.  I was in a panic, uncertain what to do or how to be.  

I remember, as well, how I felt when, after far too long, the President finally spoke, how hollow and uncomforting his words were.  I had never been a fan George W. Bush, but even so, I had expected something, some kind of reassurance, but I only remember saber rattling.  Even then, in that moment, I felt the way that this was being used.  It was not an effort to address the wrongs, but instead a choice to leverage the pain of that harm into further power.  I saw, of course, how, in the aftermath of that event, so many people came together.  In New York, there was a spirit that rose, yes, but also jingoism and hate.  I recall the way it seemed necessary to fly an American flag at one point, especially amongst members of certain minority groups.  People came together, but sometimes, they came together against the other.

What scares me is not remembering that, but seeing how much of it is still true, and how much it now seems to be internalized in our national identity, even, at times, in how we see each other.