9/11/09 UPDATE: Thanks to Ace for the link, and thanks to you for coming. May I please encourage you to check out this tribute to Susan A. MacKay, one of the victims from Flight 11? She needs to be remembered and honored.
After that, go on over to Project 2,996 and see tributes to the other victims.
Thanks.
***
I flew into LaGuardia Airport in Queens on the evening of Monday, September 10, 2001. I was in town to attend a meeting in advance of my upcoming move from Chicago to New York. The plan was to fly back to Chicago on Tuesday evening, September 11.
It was only my third time in the city. I was staying with a friend in Gramercy and took a taxi to 57th street, opting to walk the rest of the way so I could take in the sights and start getting a feel for the city I would be calling home in a few weeks time.
The evening was pleasant and I enjoyed the sights of beautiful women walking up and down Park Avenue.
I met up with my friend. We had a nice dinner and caught up. She retired early, and I stayed up late watching cable television.
The next morning, of course, everything went to Hell.
Her apartment was about four miles away from Ground Zero. I slept through the early part and was eventually awakened by the television reports.
I wanted to help but couldn’t get close enough to do anything. I tried to approach the World Trade Center and volunteer, but I couldn’t get south of 14th Street. In the days ahead, the no-cross line would be moved, first to Houston, then Canal. I never did learn how anyone got close enough to volunteer, and in the end I could do nothing. I even tried giving blood, but surprisingly the local hospitals were all flush with more donations than they could take.
My cell phone was dead, and I was unable to get a call through to anyone in my family just to let them know I was okay. My mother was very concerned, but there was nothing I could do to reassure her.
I wandered around, first heading south, then later north, eventually topping the northern edge of Central Park, listening obsessively to the radio, first trying to get information from the programs on WABC and later listening to the unusually somber, serious and angry programming on comedy talk WNEW. Opie & Anthony and The Ron & Fez Show devoted their airtime to talking phone calls and letting their audience vent their sorrow, anger and confusion.
The streets were sparsely populated and quiet, but I lacked the frame of reference then to appreciate how odd that was, or how unusual that all the businesses were shuttered starting in the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t even quite realize how unusual the smell was or how out of place the falling pieces of paper were, even in a city as notoriously filthy as Manhattan.
The following night my friend and I had dinner with an acquaintance of hers, a young doctor. He was the first person I heard voice what would later be routinely identified as the insane mantras of the Truther movement. I don’t remember the details anymore, but I know he wanted to blame the whole thing on George W. Bush. I wanted to punch him in the mouth.
Later that night there was a bomb scare at the Empire State Building, requiring an evacuation of my friend’s block. We scrambled, somewhat frantically, to get out of the danger area. Of course, it all amounted to nothing, and we were eventually allowed to return to her apartment. This was to be a familiar experience that week, a kind of numbness punctuated by occasional bursts of hysteria as another bomb threat and evacuation would be announced.
On the second night my friend opted to leave Manhattan at the behest of her concerned father, but I stayed put and tried to figure out how I was going to get back to Chicago. All the flights had been canceled, and I didn’t know what to do.
Her high-speed Internet connection was still up somehow, and I spent some time online trying to get more news and information. I read some message boards and saw liberal commenters expressing outrage over some story or other claiming that some middle-eastern looking people had been taken off a flight. This was when I first saw people expressing the odious “what did we do to make them hate us” mentality, poisonous and naïve from the start.
On Friday, I was able to rent a car and decided to just drive back to Chicago. Traffic in Manhattan was still nightmarish, but eventually, I got out and drove almost nonstop back to the Midwest, stopping occasionally to nap in my car. It took me about 24 hours.
Three weeks later I drove back to New York and have lived here most of the time since. My friends look at the skyline and feel pangs over the missing towers, but I don’t. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just that I never really saw them before, and I can’t miss what I don’t remember. I really didn’t even notice them when I flew in on September 10, and their view was obscured by all the highrises in my vicinity that night. Like it or not, my personal experience of the south skyline has always been WTC-free.
***
As a coda, let me just point out one more really terrible aspect of what happened: the fact that the towers have still not been rebuilt, that the site remains a gaping hole in the ground and that some people want to build a What We Did To Make Them Hate Us/Blame America First Memorial Site. It is a shame and a disgrace in a way that strikes me as distinctly un-American. At this point, it’s almost a joke.
Well, the Hell with that, I say. Rebuild the towers. Build three of them, and make the one in the center taller, like a middle finger being extended in the face of the savagery that perpetrated this nightmare in the first place.
God Bless America. God bless our troops. God bless their mission. God bless George W. Bush.
