one year later.
it’s been a year. you’ve all seen it on tv, you’ve been inundating by tear-jerky, flag-waving, nonstop documentaries. all the emotion and turmoil you experienced a year ago is being dregded back up and shoved down your throat. but here, i swear i won’t make you cry, and that’s more than i can say for diane sawyer and her ilk.
i took today off from work. not so that i can attend a weepy mass memorial, or go to a prayer service, or light a candle. those are valid ways of dealing with grief, they’re just not mine. instead, i’m going to spend the day without turning on the television or the radio. i’m going to stay away from manhattan. not because i’m afraid of history repeating itself as macabre farce, but because i don’t want to look into the eyes of other new yorkers and read their thoughts. see the same questions: where were you a year ago? did you lose your loved ones? did you see the planes? are you okay?
i’m okay. and i’ll tell you what – so is new york. we’re okay, here.
but i’ve got a few things i want to share with you. to begin with, i slept through the attacks. that’s not entirely true: the new editor of the paper at slc woke me up that morning, by calling my land line, at 9 am, to tell me, “something wierd is happening down at the twin towers, when you wake up, will you write a quickie news piece for this week’s paper?” at that time, it was only one plane, one strange fluke, one bizarre moment on an achingly blue day in september.
by the time i woke up, at 10:45, the towers were gone. i spent the day wandering around in a daze. my story of that morning blends into a whirlwind of other normal new yorker’s stories.
what i really think about, when i think about the disaster that shook the foundations of new york and all our lives a year ago, is actually an older story than the saga of that day.
when i was 19, i lived on the west side of washington square park for six weeks in the summer. it was a riotous time, full of debauchery and disobedience. i lived with a bunch of other young kids in an nyu dorm – with nothing to do, we would go drinking down on macdougal til all hours of the night.
some nights, we’d be out so late that some of us would watch the sun come up. it was on those nights that we’d hop on a train, still pretty soused, and head down the the world trade center for krispy kreme donuts, at six in the morning.
we’d sit out there, with our donuts, and our clothes all rumpled and smelling like smoke and bars, and we’d watch the businessfolk scurrying to work. we’d laugh, we would, because they just looked like tools, cogs in the faceless corporate machine. i admit, i mocked them. not maliciously, but still. they weren’t people to me. the towers weren’t beautiful and majestic to me, they were eyesores. they dwarfed the empire state building, one of my favorite pieces of architecture in the world. and as i watched the people walk by in their grey suits, i never once thought of who they really were.
well, now i’m one of those people. i get on a train every morning, with countless faceless workers, and go to my job. and when the towers fell, when i wandered around manhattan seeing those heartbreaking signs, ‘missing, my wife’ , ‘missing, my wonderful son’ – suddenly all my naivete, those long summer days in 2000, looked painful to me. these were people, not faceless cogs in a machine. and they died, having done nothing horribly wrong.
here’s what still hurts me, a year later: for each one of those deaths that september day, at least four people’s lives were shattered, irredeemably ruined. those people loved people. those people enjoyed days at the beach, or running in marathons, or late night television. they laughed a certain way, their hair parted a certain way, they’d had tragedy and joy and frustration. they were human. they had kids, they had college buddies, they had their regular deli guy who knew they liked their coffee cream, no sugar. they were loved. and now they’re gone.
and that’s what i think about today. not the fight for freedom, not the war in afghanistan, not getting revenge, not the american flag. i think about each one of those people, and i humbly offer my apologies to them for demeaning their value in the world. i miss them.
and because of that, i’m going to spend this day remembering what love really means – love makes us unique. love makes us human, it makes us irreplaceably valuable to the people who love us. and those people who are gone, they are still loved, for exactly who they were.
on ne voit qu’avec le coeur. l’essentiel est invisible aux yeux.