remembering 9/11

It’s hard to remember; it’s hard to forget.

I left my building at 9:05. Oddly, there were a lot of people on the sidewalk—way more than usual. It was strange. The first plane had hit, and I could see the thick cloud of black smoke billowing madly against the brilliant blue sky, although I couldn’t see the World Trade Center tower itself. We lived too far—a little over a mile away. A couple of my neighbors were standing outside our building. A plane had crashed into one of the towers, one of them said. He’d heard it on the radio just before leaving the house. We looked at each other. It was a rare perfect late- summer day in New York: crisp and sparkling. Indeed it would be one of the most magificent autumns, weather-wise, that I can recall in more than 30 years of living in New York City.

How could a plane crash into one of the towers, with this visibility?

We looked at each other, and did not ask that question out loud. But it passed between us before we went our separate ways.

I headed for the drugstore around the corner, where it took them fifteen minutes to fill my prescription. The pharmacist was listening to the radio. Yes, a plane had crashed into the tower; it was confirmed. I remember no details about the broadcast, only that it sank in that this was deliberate.

Still, it had happened before, and that attack on the World Trade Center turned out to be not that big a deal. At least that’s how I thought of it. When I did think of it. Which was never. And I’m someone who has alwas read up on politics and news—local and global. The politically informed and sophisticated people I knew never talked about it either. Ever. Not once.

When the attack happened, we said: “Oh shit.” And then we simply forgot about it.

We did not pay attention. The quest to become a player in the New Gilded Age had overtaken everyone. I wasn’t competing in that arena, but just a few days earlier we’d put the finishing touches on our renovated kitchen. Many times since then I’ve thought of how grateful I am to the fates that I worked up the courage to go through with that nightmare project in the 105-degree heat of August 2001, because I don’t think I’d have had it in me afterward. Not that I haven’t been nesting, along with the rest of America—that is a discernible trend: nesting, and sheltering, and all the goodies that go with them.

Anyway, I went back home with the prescription medicine and gave it to my daughter, who wasn’t feeling well. She should stay home, I told her. I was going to the office.

Many times since then I have wondered what got into me that I instructed her to stay home while I left for midtown. She was 16, and feeling under the weather. Her father had just reported for jury duty—downtown at the courthouse, not far away from the Twin Towers. I figured he’d be let out, and would be home soon. (All would be well at home: home was home. And our son, a senior in college, was upstate.) She should stay home and wait for her father. I had things to do at the office.

What things? What was I thinking?

What was I thinking when I left her at home, walked a few blocks to buy a magazine I’d been looking for, heard on the radio that the Pentagon had been hit, and still went downstairs into the subway station, rode uptown, walked into my office, only to learn that the first tower had collapsed.

I was not thinking.

I was in denial.

Denial is your ticket to the future, as a wise man once said.

To be continued…maybe.

Peace out.