Not Fade Away

Many people far more articulate than I am have offered their reflections today, ranging from the world stage to the deeply personal, but as a witness to the events that took place seven years ago, I feel somewhat compelled to offer my own. It's an odd balance: it's a day when I appreciate being just another New Yorker who was downtown that morning, but it's also still true that the memory of that morning still exists in painful, singular detail; as universal and allegedly unifying as the day remains, it's also true everyone has their own experience of it. It's exactly the way one of my friends put it: the memory divides people into us and them - those who watched it go down in the safety of their homes and offices, and those of us who were right there, who had the story even before the networks did.

Like most people who were downtown that morning, I can recall, minute by minute, every step, every breath, every expression of disbelief: even the long, painfully endured vision of standing in my old conference room during those few minutes between the first plane and the second, when we still thought it was just a terrible accident. I was alone, staring out the window, my shock-addled brain bouncing from thought to thought: How will they ever fix the damage? There are people who are dying, right now, before my eyes. I am dreaming this. This isn't really happening.

I cried most of the way to work today, safe, in my basically armored vehicle, alone with my radio and my thoughts, alone with Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" and the moments of silence. My thoughts moved from that morning in the conference room to the moments of now: Abby lighting the yahrzeit candle in the Museum lobby, Audrey with her new baby, Connor in his 3rd grade classroom, Ellen still asleep in California. I wondered if there were any other people crying in their cars. I wondered if there were people crying on the subway and Metro North.

I no longer take the subway to work, no longer trace my steps downtown each morning with a sense of fear and dread, that today will be the day, that this train will be the one, that the guardsman standing in front of the florist in Grand Central can't really help if something goes wrong; that his job will be recovery, not rescue.

But there wasn't really any safety from today's sadness. This year it is hitting much harder for some reason that I can't quite figure out, nor do I have the energy to try. Even in Westchester, a place I consider inhabited mostly by "them" (those who watched it on TV), everywhere I've been today, I've heard and overheard conversations I didn't expect to hear: a woman's voice drifts out of her open car door, saying: "They didn't know I was alive. I tried and tried calling, but all the cell phones were down." Two colleagues smoking in front of our building's doors: "It wasn't like Mother Nature got angry. It wasn't an act of G-d." "3,000 people dead and we're no safer now than we were that morning. Probably less safe now, actually. What does it all mean? What was it all for?"

I thought about having a pumpernickel bagel for breakfast this morning. I happened to stop at Zaro's in Grand Central that morning for one, but they were all out. In a typical entitled New Yorker snit, I bitched out the girl behind the counter before settling for onion. A few weeks later, afflicted with the fever of kindness that had descended upon the city when I returned to work, I apologized. She looked at me like I had three heads. The onion one was still in its wax-paper wrapper on my desk when I got back to my office, covered in a fine layer of buttery grease and grayish dust.

I'm used to the skyline now. When I came back from Delaware this weekend I didn't feel the sadness and shock of not seeing the towers, all through college my first sign of home, the signal that I had only about 45 minutes to go before pulling in my driveway. For all the years of college and grad school they were the sign that I had escaped - from tough classes, from idiot boyfriends, from the fear that nothing was going the way it was supposed to; the skyline's message was that it didn't matter - I would be home soon, and someone would take care of me. But coming back this weekend, I realized that none of that is true anymore, so I just took the exit for the bridge and kept going.

And yet, for all of the painful memories of that morning, when I close my eyes I can still remember that summer Saturday in 1976, the ride into the city with the bicentennial star everywhere, even on the fire hydrants, and my dad's hand in mine as we stepped off the elevator and made our way through the glass doors to the rooftop, snaked with cables and wires and equipment, a place where most people weren't allowed to go, but where we had special access.

It was before I had ever been on an airplane, before I learned how to be afraid of heights. Together we walked the perimeter of the rooftop and looked all around, at the bridges strung across the East River, at the flat, industrial plain of New Jersey across the Hudson, at the companion rooftop of the south tower looming comfortingly close by.

My dad had just solved his first big case in the towers and I remember how the other officers greeted him like a hero. But more than that, I remember the city that he showed me that afternoon, as we looked from the top of the north tower and he pointed out landmarks and buildings and streets as if they were gifts he was giving to me, as if it was a kingdom that I would inherit, a place that would belong to me the way it belonged to him, someday.