Like Any Other Day

I haven't been able to get good reception on my clock radio lately, and with no cable, I don't watch much television. I don't read the newspaper, though I usually check the New York Times and a few other news sites during my coffee break at work (shh... don't tell) and again when I get home. So with such little exposure to the media, it was pretty easy to forget what today was.

Well, almost.

Today was gloomy, promising rain that hasn't come yet, but earlier this week the sky was bright and blue and cloudless. Just like that day, seven years ago. A co-worker remarked that this kind of early fall weather is almost spoiled for her now, and everyone else in the office who had been in the city then agreed.

I stay away from the financial district and lower Manhattan. Not consciously, really. It's just I generally have very little reason to be down there. But I go down there sometimes, and when I see that giant scar in the ground, or that hole in the sky where those two icons used to be, I remember. And I feel a little sick.

All that death and destruction. All those lives lost. All those people who were minding their own business, just going to work. Who thought that day was just another day.

I wasn't in New York on September 11, 2001. I was in Delaware, getting ready for a meeting with my thesis advisor. I remember hearing the reports on NPR. One plane hit. Everyone thought it was a mistake, an accident. I took a shower. When I came out, everything was different. The second plane. The Pentagon. The crash in Pennsylvania. I drove to school. Didn't know what else to do. We were all in shock, I think, trying to be normal. People who knew people who worked in New York tried to call their friends and family, just to check in. A few hours into the day they closed the museum campus, "for security." We all thought that was funny, in the way that things can be funny and sad and horrible at the same time. I drove home (I remember the streets seemed oddly empty) and turned on the tv, watched for as long as I could stand, and then curled up into a little ball in bed and cried.

I had been to New York City for the first time earlier that year. I loved it immediately. But my love was a tourist's love, a reader and movie watcher's love. I loved the magic the city promised, I loved all the history it held, but I knew very little about what living there was really like. I loved the idea of New York, and dreamed that maybe I could live there one day. I didn't know the practicalities, the challenges of the daily grind, the gritty but often wonderful reality. I know a little more now, one year into my tenure in the Bronx. Though I can never really know what it was like in the City that day, knowing life in New York as I do now, I can barely begin to imagine. But even the city I love is different than the New York that existed before 9/11. Shaped in innumerable ways by a tragedy too terrible to contemplate. I wonder how the city I have come to know would be different now, if things had been different.

Seven years is a very long time. But sometimes it isn't very long at all.

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If you've made it all the way to the end of my rambling, and if you can stand to read one more thing about that day, from someone who was there, and who can say it far better than I, I highly recommend this. The first two links in her essay will tell you all about Sars and her search for Don, if you need a little background. If by some chance Don sounds at all familiar to you, please let her know.