Today

So… today was about remembering, not reliving. That was a good start. Phil and I overslept, but I wasn’t worried about that because I had a strong sense that trying to get anywhere near the site while all the official events were still going on was going to be both impossible and misery-inducing. So we went later. And that was fine.

Things did not start completely smoothly. When we left our hotel, we made a stop at Starbucks (excruciatingly slow, for some reason, but I’d had no access to coffee at all, so this was not optional) and then had a long, difficult time on the subway to get downtown. We got off at West 4^th Street, where my train got stopped on 9/11, and walked down, as I did then, to Tribeca and my old place of business from there.

I have to admit that, although the first moments of coming up out of the subway and seeing the Towers is burned into my memory, and although a few other moments from the trip are also clear and unforgettable, I don’t really remember most of it at all. I did remember the blocks south of Canal, but not from 9/11 itself. Those are the streets I walked for some days and weeks after, when the subway didn’t run any farther and we had to show ID and other paperwork to get through the checkpoints at Canal. In those days, that southern tip of Manhattan was spooky, like a post-apocalypse movie. There was no traffic on the streets except for the occasional emergency vehicle, and many of the buildings were empty. Businesses were closed and lots of the residents had evacuated.

Today there were plenty of people, mostly in groups and couples, as you’d imagine. And when we got down to Duane Street, where I worked, things began to feel more meaningful. I stood on the corner of Duane and Greenwich and took pictures. This is where I stood and watched the first tower fall. On following days, this is also where every news organization in the world would set up and broadcast their reports. Remember all those talking heads with the smoking site and seven-story pile of debris looming behind them? They were all shot on Greenwich Street, three doors down from my place of business, Real Pilates.

Things today went downhill after that. At first, we couldn’t get within three blocks of the site, and when some of the barricades eventually came down, we still couldn’t see much. For all the organization that was in evidence — police with wands manning barricades and checkpoints, paths and wayfinding for the families and others who’d been invited to the morning’s ceremonies — there was also remarkable chaos. The police didn’t seem to know what was happening, and nowhere was there any information about what places were accessible, how to get anywhere, or what would happen later.

And then, of course, there were the protest groups, which I go off about in a different post. Heavy sigh there.

The thing that was missing today was any sense of community. There’s more to say about that, but, again, it must wait for a longer post or no one will ever read this one. I’m glad we went, and I want to go again and try to see something of the actual plaza that’s at least partly there now. Those are the positive takeaways of today. But I also feel pretty completely excluded from the proceedings, which is what I’ve felt at most of the significant moments of the redesign and rebuilding process ever since 2001. That’s the more negative takeaway. But it does make me think that perhaps I need to let go of this place and this event to a greater extent, as it’s clearly let go of me. Sad, but perhaps, in the end, a happier choice. Stay tuned for updates.

The Great Bird of Disaster

The day is, as they say, fast approaching. In fact, it’s tomorrow. The weather’s not quite as good as it was in September ten years ago, but it’s good enough; this year, however, there are cops and military all over, watching for signs that someone might want to commemorate the 9/11 anniversary by destroying even more lives.

Phil and I saw a police barricade outside Times Square last night. I told him about the news I’d seen that two “credible informants” had passed word that terrorist organizations, including, possibly, al Queda, would be attempting an attack on Sunday. Law enforcement groups had zeroed in on two rental vans and were trying to find them all across the country. They suspected the vans might get packed with explosives and used as car bombs.

I made some flippant remark that coming to New York for this anniversary could get us blown up. But Phil pointed out we could get blown up anywhere, at any time. Or killed in an earthquake in our own deeply unstable city. Or suffer any of innumerable other terrible fates. He wasn’t being negative when he said this. He was just stating the simple truth, that life is not safe or predictable. It never has been, and, given our ‘round-the-clock drama fixation on CNN, MSNBC, and all the others, any belief that any of us is constitutionally exempt from such fates has become culpably naïve.

In a sense, this statement hearkens back to my own “we’ll never feel safe again,” moment as I watched the smoke and flames billow from the Towers. That was the death of my own innocence, I guess. But it does not indicate that doom and gloom are inescapable. Recognizing that there’s no ultimate safety is not the same as saying that tragedy is right around the corner.

You might think horror was inevitable, judging from what we see on the news and in our violence-loving entertainment. You might assume that nearly all of us will meet violent ends and that tragedy stalks every life. It doesn’t, and the fact that we could be the victims of some kind of horror doesn’t mean it’s likely that we will be. The world is a big place, and you and I are very small individuals. And the number of horrors that happen in any given lifetime is limited. There is no reason to think that something bad is going to happen to Phil and me, even here in New York on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. And there is every reason not to give in to fear.

I’ll be keeping my eyes open tomorrow morning, just as I do in every public place, when traveling, or anywhere I go. But I’ll still go where I want to go and do what I want to do, within reason. If the Great Bird of Disaster swoops down, well, I guess I’ll deal with that then, hoping to stay clearheaded and smart about how I do it. It’s worked so far.

Taller Than Giants

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were so tall that it was hard to see them. I mean it was hard to conceive of how big they really were, even as you stood staring at them. Your eye tended to reduce them, to perceive them as more or less ordinary skyscrapers. I always had to make a deliberate effort, to go back and make my eye travel up all those rows of windows, to force myself to see how immensely out of scale they were. The Towers were never beautiful. But they were always awe-inspiring.

There was a moment, as I was running toward them on that morning, when that visual trickiness came into play. Staring at the gashes ripped through them by the planes, at the smoke and flames, I struggled to understand the scale of what I was seeing. How big were those tears? How expansive were those clouds of smoke and fire? I couldn’t figure it out.

Around the tops of the Towers there were fluttering clouds of debris. They looked like papers caught in a windstorm. But I had my usual moment of, “no, they’re much bigger than that — look closer,” and I saw that the debris was whole pieces of furniture, sections of wallboard with torn edges, things the size of my mattress at home, and bigger. All getting chucked and sucked out through the air hundreds of feet above the rest of Lower Manhattan.

I heard someone I was passing on the sidewalk say, “There goes another one,” and I squinted up, scanned the debris cloud, to see what he meant. I focused on a tiny figure with windmilling limbs arcing down through the air. A person.

Fallen? Or jumped? Sucked out as the air evacuated a burning room through a shattered window? Panicked? Deliberate? No way to know. Falling now, certainly. Arms and legs going in fast motion. Struggling, even as there was no longer anything to struggle against.

I looked down and didn’t look up again. How can you watch that? The person I saw flying out of the Twin Towers may have chosen their own end. They may have chosen the clear air, rather than continue choking on the smoke and waiting to be burned or crushed. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable decision. Regardless — windmilling arms and legs, silhouetted against the blue sky, falling alongside all that fluttering debris.

It’s one of the moments that defines the day, in my mind. No matter what the story was behind that person’s fall/jump/fate, they are the tragedy of 9/11. The planes were an attack, the fall was a disaster, the plan was a crime against humanity, God, and the world. But that person falling was a tragedy. Even now, it makes me nauseous.