September 11th

The weather today is cloudy, gloomy, the air is full of moisture in tiny droplets that press down against the Earth. Nothing like how it was that day, clear and sunny – a bright early fall day, the kind of day when the city feels clean and the air feels fresh.

There’s just some scattered memories, it’s hard to believe it was already so many years ago.

We were in our kitchen, working on a quilt for the soon-to-come baby of one of our friends (that baby will almost be an adult this year, but we haven’t seen them in forever).

We had one of those small TVs that are made for the kitchen, that hung under the upper cabinet – some morning talk show was on.

Then the first news reports – there was a fire at the World Trade Center – it was a tourist helicopter or a small plane that had crashed, they said. Cut back to the talk show for a few minutes. The news crew came back on, visibly shaken by what they were hearing – first through the little things in their ears, and then as news became more frantic, people talking and shouting from offscreen (this was the beginning of when it started to feel like something that was different from other events).

Like millions of other people, we were watching live when the second plane crashed into the South Tower.

At that point, all speculation fell away on what the cause was – the sky was too clear, the sun too bright, the view too plain for there to any doubt that what was happening was a deliberate attack. That moment, I think, will stay with me forever.

After that, the memories become more jumpy – we were parents, this was happening a few miles from our house, and the unreality of the situation took over.

Seeing the South Tower collapse, and knowing that as bad as we thought that it was – it was going to be much worse.

Driving to school, listening to the news on the radio – retrieving our kids. There were already dozens of other parents there doing the same thing when we arrived. The school didn’t ask any questions, they just released them.

Getting back home, feeling safer because we were all together, watching the news on that little TV (DiaryMistress asked our middle son yesterday what he remembered from that day, he said he remembered watching that little TV and then going upstairs and playing CounterStrike with his older brothers – shooting the digital proxies of the bad guys).

By that time, the North Tower had collapsed, and the first pieces of video started to play endlessly.

Fighter jets roaring over the house, several times – I was outside for one of them, a pair of F-16s that seemed to be flying with a purpose, headed east.

Seeing the video of the dust clouds and smoke coating lower Manhattan, and wondering how far the damage would spread.

More news, from the Pentagon and then from Pennsylvania.

The airspace over us emptying out – we were in the flight path for a couple of airports, so commercial air traffic was a regular thing overhead – and suddenly it was silent. Weird.

We kept working on the quilt – it felt like grasping at something that was normal, touching something from Before, because now we didn’t know what was going to happen After.

Night came inevitably, and our kids went to sleep, us trying to tell them the world had not just tipped on its axis. Realizing that I had never considered what it meant to be a parent in a country that was under attack.

We finished the quilt that night, watching the desperate search for survivors under gigantic lights. We probably should have kept that quilt.

The days that followed were all the same – watching the news endlessly, the blood drives, the flags everywhere, quickly realizing blood drives were unnecessary – because the ranks of the dead far outnumbered the ranks of the injured. The news, on and on.

The first time I came to the city for a job interview, I was in the World Trade Center. In the original WTC Plaza, you could walk right up to the side of the Twin Towers, and stand where they intersected the earth and concrete, standing like steel bones on the Manhattan schist. I stood there in my new suit, and put a hand on the steel. You could feel the vibration of commerce and transactions and trade happening – others might say “pulsing” but it wasn’t like that – it was cold and pure and when you looked straight up the full height of it, it looked like a highway running into the sky.

That was the era of Wall Street, and “greed is good”, and that place – with its giant structures, and oversized sculptures – was a temple to all of that.  And suddenly, it was empty space.

A hole in the skyline – where there had always been those two towers, anchoring the right side of the picture. They were always there, the first thing you saw as you drove towards the city. And then they weren’t.

When you walk through that area now, through the tourists and vendors, among all the businesspeople that have returned and the new construction that has happened – you feel it, the weight – the presence – of the people who were there that day. It is an unfortunate thing that human memory fades, but I think over time we are forced to make tragedy less tragic. That serves as no comfort to people who actually lost loved ones and family members that day, and I feel for them on every anniversary, as the ceremonies become shorter and smaller, and the remembrances become fewer. I hope that they can find some measure of comfort this day.